bly
shortened by Tom's quarter-hourly consultations of his father's watch.

It scarcely seemed to Basil and Isabel that their fellow-passengers were
so interesting as their fellow passengers used to be in their former
days of travel. They were soberly dressed, and were all of a middle-aged
sobriety of deportment, from which nothing salient offered itself for
conjecture or speculation; and there was little within the car to take
their minds from the brilliant young world that flashed and sang by them
outside. The belated spring had ripened, with its frequent rains, into
the perfection of early summer; the grass was thicker and the foliage
denser than they had ever seen it before; and when they had run out
into the hills beyond Fitchburg, they saw the laurel in bloom. It was
everywhere in the woods, lurking like drifts among the underbrush, and
overflowing the tops, and stealing down the hollows, of the railroad
embankments; a snow of blossom flushed with a mist of pink. Its shy,
wild beauty ceased whenever the train stopped, but the orioles made
up for its absence with their singing in the village trees about the
stations; and though Fitchburg and Ayer's Junction and Athol are not
names that invoke historical or romantic associations, the hearts of
Basil and Isabel began to stir with the joy of travel before they had
passed these points. At the first Basil got out to buy the cold chicken
which had been commanded, and he recognized in the keeper of the
railroad restaurant their former conductor, who had been warned by the
spirits never to travel without a flower of some sort carried between
his lips, and who had preserved his own life and the lives of his
passengers for many years by this simple device. His presence lent the
sponge cake and rhubarb pie and baked beans a supernatural interest,
and reconciled Basil to the toughness of the athletic bird which the
mystical ex-partner of fate had sold him; he justly reflected that if
he had heard the story of the restaurateur's superstition in a foreign
land, or another time, he would have found in it a certain poetry. It
was this willingness to find poetry in things around them that kept his
life and Isabel's fresh, and they taught their children the secret of
their elixir. To be sure, it was only a genre poetry, but it was such
as has always inspired English art and song; and now the whole family
enjoyed, as if it had been a passage from Goldsmith or Wordsworth, the
flying s