show her just what people
may be expected to feel _after_ they are dead.

America had been for Phyl little more than a geographical expression.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Settlers in Canada"
and "Round the World in Eighty Days," had given her pictures, and from
these she had built up a vague land of snow and forests, log huts, plains,
Red Indians, runaway negroes and men with bowie knives.

New York had given this fantastic idea a rough joggle, the south-bound
express tumbled it all to pieces.

Forests and mountains and plains would have been familiar to her
imagination, but the south-bound express was producing for her inspection
quite different things from these.

New Jersey with its populous towns, for instance, towns she never could
have imagined or dreamed of, filled with people whose existence she could
not picture.

What gave her a cold grue was the suddenly grasped fact that all this
great mechanism of life, cities, towns, roaring railways, agricultural
lands, manufacturing districts filled with English speaking people--that
all this was alien, knew nothing of Ireland or England, except as it might
know of Japan or a dream of the past.

The people in the train were talking English--were English to all intents
and purposes, and yet, as far as England and Ireland were concerned, she
knew them to be dead.

It had been freezing in New York, a great rainstorm was blowing across the
world as they crossed the Delaware; it passed, sweeping away east under
the arch of a vast rainbow, even the rainbow seemed alien and different to
Irish rainbows--it was too big.

Then came Philadelphia, where some of the dead folk left the train and
others got in. One had an Irish voice and accent. He was a big man with a
hard, pushful face and a great under jaw. Phyl knew him at once for what
he was, and that he had died to Ireland long years ago.

Then came Wilmington and Baltimore, and then, long after sunset in the
dark, a warmer air that entered the train like a viewless passenger, nerve
soothing and mind lulling--the first breath of the South.

Next morning, looking from the windows of the car, she saw the South. Vast
spaces of low-lying land broken by river and bayou, flooded by the light
of the new risen sun and touched by a vague mist from the sea, soft as a
haze of summer, warm with light and everywhere hinting at the blue deep
sky beyond.

Youth, morning, and the spirit of the sea all la