urs,
and sob upon one another's necks. Did that old lady talk to you in the
same strain?"

"O no! she spoke very calmly of her sickness, and said she had lived a
blessed life. Perhaps it was that made me shed those few small tears. She
seemed a very religious person."

"Yes," said Basil, "it is almost a pity that religion is going out. But
then you are to have the franchise."

"All aboard!"

This warning cry saved him from whatever heresy he might have been about
to utter; and presently the train carried them out into the gas-sprinkled
darkness, with an ever-growing speed that soon left the city lamps far
behind. It is a phenomenon whose commonness alone prevents it from being
most impressive, that departure of the night-express. The two hundred
miles it is to travel stretch before it, traced by those slender clews,
to lose which is ruin, and about which hang so many dangers. The draw
bridges that gape upon the way, the trains that stand smoking and
steaming on the track, the rail that has borne the wear so long that it
must soon snap under it, the deep cut where the overhanging mass of rock
trembles to its fall, the obstruction that a pitiless malice may have
placed in your path,--you think of these after the journey is done, but
they seldom haunt your fancy while it lasts. The knowledge of your
helplessness in any circumstances is so perfect that it begets a sense of
irresponsibility, almost of security; and as you drowse upon the pallet
of the sleeping car, and feel yourself hurled forward through the
obscurity, you are almost thankful that you can do nothing, for it is
upon this condition only that you can endure it; and some such condition
as this, I suppose, accounts for many heroic facts in the world. To the
fantastic mood which possesses you equally, sleeping or waking, the
stoppages of the train have a weird character; and Worcester,
Springfield, New Haven, and Stamford are rather points in dream-land than
well-known towns of New England. As the train stops you drowse if you
have been waking, and wake if you have been in a doze; but in any case
you are aware of the locomotive hissing and coughing beyond the station,
of flaring gas-jets, of clattering feet of passengers getting on and off;
then of some one, conductor or station-master, walking the whole length
of the train; and then you are aware of an insane satisfaction in renewed
flight through the darkness. You think hazily of the folk in their beds
in