The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict (The Mysterious Benedict Society: Prequel)

The train station at Pebbleton, dark and sooty though it was, glistened in the mist. Electric lamps above the platform cast their light upon a thousand reflecting surfaces: the puddles along the tracks, the streaked windows of the station house, the umbrellas hoisted over huddled, indistinct figures on the platform. To a person of whimsical mind, the scene might resemble something from a tale, a magical gathering in a dark wood, the umbrellas looming like toadstools over fairy folk.
There was, in fact, such a person watching from the window of the approaching train, a boy of whimsical mind, to be sure (though whimsy was not the half of it, nor even the beginning), and the fairy-tale qualities of the scene occurred to him at once. So too did a great many other things, including the sentence ‘It glistened in the mist; the train hissed, and I listened,’ a poetic train of thought that sounded rather like a train itself, which pleased him. But foremost in the boy’s mind was the awareness that Pebbleton station was his stop – the end of his train journey, the beginning of a new unknown.