r several days, but that morning the east wind
came in, and crisped the air till it seemed to rustle like tinsel, and
the sky was as sincerely and solidly blue as if it had been chromoed.
They felt that they were really looking up into the roof of the world,
when they glanced at it; but when an old gentleman hastily kissed a
young woman, and commended her to the conductor as being one who was
going all the way to San Francisco alone, and then risked his life by
stepping off the moving train, the vastness of the great American fact
began to affect Isabel disagreeably. "Is n't it too big, Basil?" she
pleaded, peering timidly out of the little municipal consciousness in
which she had been so long housed.--In that seclusion she had suffered
certain original tendencies to increase upon her; her nerves were more
sensitive and electrical; her apprehensions had multiplied quite beyond
the ratio of the dangers that beset her; and Basil had counted upon a
tonic effect of the change the journey would make in their daily lives.
She looked ruefully out of the window at the familiar suburbs whisking
out of sight, and the continental immensity that advanced devouringly
upon her. But they had the best section in the very centre of the
sleeping-car,--she drew what consolation she could from the fact,--and
the children's premature demand for lunch helped her to forget her
anxieties; they began to be hungry as soon as the train started. She
found that she had not put up sandwiches enough; and when she told Basil
that he would have to get out somewhere and buy some cold chicken, he
asked her what in the world had become of that whole ham she had had
boiled. It seemed to him, he said, that there was enough of it to
subsist them to Niagara and back; and he went on as some men do, while
Somerville vanished, and even Tufts College, which assails the Bostonian
vision from every point of the compass, was shut out by the curve at the
foot of the Belmont hills.

They had chosen the Hoosac Tunnel route to Niagara, because, as Basil
said, their experience of travel had never yet included a very long
tunnel, and it would be a signal fact by which the children would always
remember the journey, if nothing else remarkable happened to impress it
upon them. Indeed, they were so much concerned in it that they began to
ask when they should come to this tunnel, even before they began to ask
for lunch; and the long time before they reached it was not percepti