ferings with chloroform? It
was suggested that it might shorten life. "What then?" I said. "Are a
dozen additional spasms worth living for?"

The time approached for the train to arrive from Hagerstown, and we went
to the station. I was struck, while waiting there, with what seemed to
me a great want of care for the safety of the people standing round.
Just after my companion and myself had stepped off the track, I noticed a
car coming quietly along at a walk, as one may say, without engine,
without visible conductor, without any person heralding its approach, so
silently, so insidiously, that I could not help thinking how very near it
came to flattening out me and my match-box worse than the Ravel
pantomimist and his snuff-box were flattened out in the play. The train
was late,--fifteen minutes, half an hour late, and I began to get
nervous, lest something had happened. While I was looking for it, out
started a freight-train, as if on purpose to meet the cars I was
expecting, for a grand smash-up. I shivered at the thought, and asked an
employee of the road, with whom I had formed an acquaintance a few
minutes old, why there should not be a collision of the expected train
with this which was just going out. He smiled an official smile, and
answered that they arranged to prevent that, or words to that effect.

Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment when a collision did
occur, just out of the city, where I feared it, by which at least eleven
persons were killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed and
crippled!

To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing worse. The expected
train came in so quietly that I was almost startled to see it on the
track. Let us walk calmly through the cars, and look around us.

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain;
there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many
cities.

"How are you, Boy?"

"How are you, Dad?"

Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us
Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural
impulses that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so
that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, nay, which had once
overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on his
brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the women.
But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with sweet tears,
while th