and promised to take good care of her. He's
pretty gray now, but I hope he stays long enough to start another
generation of our family on its travels.

I went to my first circus, to Jonesville, on old Number Eleven. And I
went down there at sixteen, a member of the Republican Club, with a
torch, and the proudest boy in the State. The next year I started to
college with an algebra and a tennis racket under my arm (they wouldn't
jam into the trunk), and a dozen friends came down to see me off. On
Number Eleven that day I met four other boys going to the same school.
We are still close chums, though one is on the coast, another's here in
New York, and the third is in the Philippines.

[Illustration: It seemed to me then as if she must have come from heaven
by air-line.]

It was the next year that I noticed a girl as she stepped off of Number
Eleven and was met by one of the Homeburg girls. I didn't know who she
was, but it seemed to me then as if she must have come from heaven by
air-line, and I felt so friendly toward the girl who met her that I had
to go down to her house to call that very night. The visitor had come to
stay--her father was starting a new store in Homeburg. I'll tell you,
when a snorty old train, which assays two pecks of cinders per car,
hauls the most wonderful girl on earth into your town and dumps her
into your arms--so to speak, and bunching up events a little--you're
bound to love that train.

I could write the history of Homeburg from the 4:11 too. In fact, the
train has hauled most of Homeburg into the town. Year after year we
watch strangers get off the train and turn around three times, in the
way a stranger does when he tries to orient himself and locate the
nearest hotel. We get acquainted with those strangers, and in the next
week we discover their business and antecedents and politics and
preferences in jokes, and whether they pull for the Chicago Cubs or the
White Sox. In two weeks they are old-time citizens and go down with us
to welcome the newcomers. Henry Broar came to us on the 4:11. I remember
he wore a loppy hat and needed a shave that day, and we didn't assess
him very highly. But he had a whacking law practice inside of a year,
ran for county judge two years later, and now we swell up to the danger
point when people mention Congressman Broar, and let it slip modestly
that we are intimate enough with Hank to trade shirts with him.

I remember well the day two imposing stranger