mps of smoky kerosene await the passengers. There are no
porters to arrange the baggage, and each lady and gentleman digs out his
box, and opens it before the lordly inspector, who stirs up its contents
with an unpleasant hand and passes it. He makes you feel that you are
once more in the land of official insolence, and that, whatever you are
collectively, you are nothing personally. Isabel, who had sent her
husband upon this business with quaking meekness of heart, experienced
the bold indignation of virtue at his account of the way people were made
their own baggage-smashers, and would not be amused when he painted the
vile terrors of each husband as he tremblingly unlocked his wife's store
of contraband.

The morning light showed them the broad elmy meadows of western-looking
Maine; and the Grand Trunk brought them, of course, an hour behind time
into Portland. All breakfastless they hurried aboard the Boston train on
the Eastern Road, and all along that line (which is built to show how
uninteresting the earth can be when she is 'ennuyee' of both sea and
land), Basil's life became a struggle to construct a meal from the
fragmentary opportunities of twenty different stations where they stopped
five minutes for refreshments. At one place he achieved two cups of
shameless chickory, at another three sardines, at a third a dessert of
elderly bananas.

"Home again, home again, from a foreign shore!"

they softly sang as the successive courses of this feast were disposed
of.

The drouth and heat, which they had briefly escaped during their sojourn
in Canada, brooded sovereign upon the tiresome landscape. The red granite
rocks were as if red-hot; the banks of the deep cuts were like ash heaps;
over the fields danced the sultry atmosphere; they fancied that they
almost heard the grasshoppers sing above the rattle of the train. When
they reached Boston at last, they were dustier than most of us would like
to be a hundred years hence. The whole city was equally dusty; and they
found the trees in the square before their own door gray with dust. The
bit of Virginia-creeper planted under the window hung shriveled upon its
trellis.

But Isabel's aunt met them with a refreshing shower of tears and kisses
in the hall, throwing a solid arm about each of them. "O you dears!" the
good soul cried, "you don't know how anxious I've been about you; so many
accidents happening all the time. I've never read the 'Evening
Transcript'