a group of trainmen, and his own
Pullman conductor with his lantern on his arm, bending over the figure
of a man defined in his dark clothing against the snow of the bank where
he lay propped. His face was waxen white, and Alford noted how
particularly black the mustache looked traversing the pallid visage. He
never knew whether the man was killed or merely stunned; you learn
nothing with certainty of such things on trains; but now, as he thought
of the incident, its eidolon showed itself outside of his mind, and
followed him in every detail, even to a snowy stretch of the embankment,
until the increasing speed of the train seemed to sweep it back out of
sight.

Alford turned his eyes to the interior of the smoker, which, except for
two or three dozing commuters and a noisy euchre-party, had been empty
of everything but the fumes and stale odors of tobacco, and found it
swarming with visions, the eidolons of everything he remembered from his
past life. Whatever had once strongly impressed itself upon his nerves
was reported there again as instantly as he thought of it. It was
largely a whirling chaos, a kaleidoscopic jumble of facts; but from time
to time some more memorable and important experience visualized itself
alone. Such was the death-bed of the little sister whom he had been
wakened, a child, to see going to heaven, as they told him. Such was the
pathetic, foolish face of the girl whom long ago he had made believe he
cared for, and then had abruptly broken with: he saw again, with
heartache, her silly, tender amaze when he said he was going away. Such
was the look of mute astonishment, of gentle reproach, in the eyes of
the friend, now long dead, whom in a moment of insensate fury he had
struck on the mouth, and who put his hand to his bleeding lips as he
bent that gaze of wonder and bewilderment upon him. But it was not alone
the dreadful impressions that reported themselves. There were others, as
vivid, which came back in the original joyousness: the face of his
mother looking up at him from the crowd on a day of college triumph when
he was delivering the valedictory of his class; the collective gayety of
the whole table on a particularly delightful evening at his dining-club;
his own image in the glass as he caught sight of it on coming home
accepted by the woman who afterwards jilted him; the transport which
lighted up his father's visage when he stepped ashore from the vessel
which had been rumored lost,