ara is very much of a reformer, and would make an end of all of us
men, I suppose,--except her father, who supports her in the leisure
that enables her to do her deep thinking. She little knows what we poor
fellows have to suffer, and how often we break down in business hours,
and sob upon one another's necks. Did that old lady talk to you in the
same strain?"

"O no! she spoke very calmly of her sickness, and said she had lived a
blessed life. Perhaps it was that made me shed those few small tears.
She seemed a very religious person."

"Yes," said Basil, "it is almost a pity that religion is going out. But
then you are to have the franchise."

"All aboard!"

This warning cry saved him from whatever heresy he might have been
about to utter; and presently the train carried them out into the
gas-sprinkled darkness, with an ever-growing speed that soon left
the city lamps far behind. It is a phenomenon whose commonness
alone prevents it from being most impressive, that departure of the
night-express. The two hundred miles it is to travel stretch before it,
traced by those slender clews, to lose which is ruin, and about which
hang so many dangers. The draw bridges that gape upon the way, the
trains that stand smoking and steaming on the track, the rail that has
borne the wear so long that it must soon snap under it, the deep cut
where the overhanging mass of rock trembles to its fall, the obstruction
that a pitiless malice may have placed in your path,--you think of these
after the journey is done, but they seldom haunt your fancy while it
lasts. The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances is so
perfect that it begets a sense of irresponsibility, almost of security;
and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleeping car, and feel yourself
hurled forward through the obscurity, you are almost thankful that you
can do nothing, for it is upon this condition only that you can endure
it; and some such condition as this, I suppose, accounts for many heroic
facts in the world. To the fantastic mood which possesses you equally,
sleeping or waking, the stoppages of the train have a weird character;
and Worcester, Springfield, New Haven, and Stamford are rather points in
dream-land than well-known towns of New England. As the train stops you
drowse if you have been waking, and wake if you have been in a doze; but
in any case you are aware of the locomotive hissing and coughing beyond
the station, of flaring gas-jets, of