g salient offered itself for
conjecture or speculation; and there was little within the car to take
their minds from the brilliant young world that flashed and sang by them
outside. The belated spring had ripened, with its frequent rains, into
the perfection of early summer; the grass was thicker and the foliage
denser than they had ever seen it before; and when they had run out into
the hills beyond Fitchburg, they saw the laurel in bloom. It was
everywhere in the woods, lurking like drifts among the underbrush, and
overflowing the tops, and stealing down the hollows, of the railroad
embankments; a snow of blossom flushed with a mist of pink. Its shy, wild
beauty ceased whenever the train stopped, but the orioles made up for its
absence with their singing in the village trees about the stations; and
though Fitchburg and Ayer's Junction and Athol are not names that invoke
historical or romantic associations, the hearts of Basil and Isabel began
to stir with the joy of travel before they had passed these points. At
the first Basil got out to buy the cold chicken which had been commanded,
and he recognized in the keeper of the railroad restaurant their former
conductor, who had been warned by the spirits never to travel without a
flower of some sort carried between his lips, and who had preserved his
own life and the lives of his passengers for many years by this simple
device. His presence lent the sponge cake and rhubarb pie and baked beans
a supernatural interest, and reconciled Basil to the toughness of the
athletic bird which the mystical ex-partner of fate had sold him; he
justly reflected that if he had heard the story of the restaurateur's
superstition in a foreign land, or another time, he would have found in
it a certain poetry. It was this willingness to find poetry in things
around them that kept his life and Isabel's fresh, and they taught their
children the secret of their elixir. To be sure, it was only a genre
poetry, but it was such as has always inspired English art and song; and
now the whole family enjoyed, as if it had been a passage from Goldsmith
or Wordsworth, the flying sentiment of the railroad side. There was a
simple interior at one place,--a small shanty, showing through the open
door a cook stove surmounted by the evening coffee-pot, with a lazy cat
outstretched upon the floor in the middle distance, and an old woman
standing just outside the threshold to see the train go by,--which had an
unri