valed value till they came to a superannuated car on a siding in the
woods, in which the railroad workmen boarded--some were lounging on the
platform and at the open windows, while others were "washing up" for
supper, and the whole scene was full of holiday ease and sylvan comradery
that went to the hearts of the sympathetic spectators. Basil had lately
been reading aloud the delightful history of Rudder Grange, and the
children, who had made their secret vows never to live in anything but an
old canal-boat when they grew up, owned that there were fascinating
possibilities in a worn-out railroad car.

The lovely Deerfield Valley began to open on either hand, with smooth
stretches of the quiet river, and breadths of grassy intervale and
tableland; the elms grouped themselves like the trees of a park; here and
there the nearer hills broke away, and revealed long, deep, chasmed
hollows, full of golden light and delicious shadow. There were people
rowing on the water; and every pretty town had some touch of
picturesqueness or pastoral charm to offer: at Greenfield, there were
children playing in the new-mown hay along the railroad embankment; at
Shelburne Falls, there was a game of cricket going on (among the English
operatives of the cutlery works, as Basil boldly asserted). They looked
down from their car-window on a young lady swinging in a hammock, in her
door-yard, and on an old gentleman hoeing his potatoes; a group of girls
waved their handkerchiefs to the passing train, and a boy paused in
weeding a garden-bed,--and probably denied that he had paused, later. In
the mean time the golden haze along the mountain side changed to a clear,
pearly lustre, and the quiet evening possessed the quiet landscape. They
confessed to each other that it was all as sweet and beautiful as it used
to be; and in fact they had seen palaces, in other days, which did not
give them the pleasure they found in a woodcutter's shanty, losing itself
among the shadows in a solitude of the hills. The tunnel, after this, was
a gross and material sensation; but they joined the children in trying to
hold and keep it, and Basil let the boy time it by his watch. "Now," said
Tom, when five minutes were gone, "we are under the very centre of the
mountain." But the tunnel was like all accomplished facts, all hopes
fulfilled, valueless to the soul, and scarcely appreciable to the sense;
and the children emerged at North Adams with but a mean opinion of that