remained a mystery, considering the small
amount of clothing necessary to those people on the stage, what could
have filled their trunks. The young man and the two English blondes of
American birth found places in the same car with our tourists, and
enlivened the journey with their frolics. When the young man pretended to
fall asleep, they wrapped his golden curly head in a shawl, and vexed him
with many thumps and thrusts, till he bought a brief truce with a handful
of almonds; and the ladies having no other way to eat them, one of them
saucily snatched off her shoe, and cracked them hammerwise with the heel.
It was all so pleasant that it ought to have been all right; and in their
merry world of outlawry perhaps things are not so bad as we like to think
them.

The country into which the train plunges as soon as Quebec is out of
sight is very stupidly savage, and our friends had little else to do but
to watch the gambols of the players, till they came to the river St.
Francis, whose wandering loveliness the road follows through an infinite
series of soft and beautiful landscapes, and finds everywhere glassing in
its smooth current the elms and willows of its gentle shores. At one
place, where its calm broke into foamy rapids, there was a huge saw mill,
covering the stream with logs and refuse, and the banks with whole cities
of lumber; which also they accepted as no mean elements of the
picturesque. They clung the most tenderly to traces of the peasant life
they were leaving. When some French boys came aboard with wild
raspberries to sell in little birch-bark canoes, they thrilled with
pleasure, and bought them, but sighed then, and said, "What thing
characteristic of the local life will they sell us in Maine when we get
there? A section of pie poetically wrapt in a broad leaf of the
squash-vine, or pop-corn in its native tissue-paper, and advertising the
new Dollar Store in Portland?" They saw the quaintness vanish from the
farm-houses; first the dormer-windows, then the curve of the steep roof,
then the steep roof itself. By and by they came to a store with a Grecian
portico and four square pine pillars. They shuddered and looked no more.

The guiltily dreaded examination of baggage at Island Pond took place at
nine o'clock, without costing them a cent of duty or a pang of
conscience. At that charming station the trunks are piled
higgledy-piggledy into a room beside the track, where a few inspectors
with stifling la