entiment of the railroad side. There was a simple interior at
one place,--a small shanty, showing through the open door a cook stove
surmounted by the evening coffee-pot, with a lazy cat outstretched upon
the floor in the middle distance, and an old woman standing just outside
the threshold to see the train go by,--which had an unrivaled value till
they came to a superannuated car on a siding in the woods, in which the
railroad workmen boarded--some were lounging on the platform and at the
open windows, while others were "washing up" for supper, and the whole
scene was full of holiday ease and sylvan comradery that went to the
hearts of the sympathetic spectators. Basil had lately been reading
aloud the delightful history of Rudder Grange, and the children, who had
made their secret vows never to live in anything but an old canal-boat
when they grew up, owned that there were fascinating possibilities in a
worn-out railroad car.

The lovely Deerfield Valley began to open on either hand, with smooth
stretches of the quiet river, and breadths of grassy intervale and
tableland; the elms grouped themselves like the trees of a park; here
and there the nearer hills broke away, and revealed long, deep, chasmed
hollows, full of golden light and delicious shadow. There were
people rowing on the water; and every pretty town had some touch of
picturesqueness or pastoral charm to offer: at Greenfield, there were
children playing in the new-mown hay along the railroad embankment; at
Shelburne Falls, there was a game of cricket going on (among the English
operatives of the cutlery works, as Basil boldly asserted). They looked
down from their car-window on a young lady swinging in a hammock, in her
door-yard, and on an old gentleman hoeing his potatoes; a group of girls
waved their handkerchiefs to the passing train, and a boy paused in
weeding a garden-bed,--and probably denied that he had paused, later.
In the mean time the golden haze along the mountain side changed to
a clear, pearly lustre, and the quiet evening possessed the quiet
landscape. They confessed to each other that it was all as sweet and
beautiful as it used to be; and in fact they had seen palaces, in other
days, which did not give them the pleasure they found in a woodcutter's
shanty, losing itself among the shadows in a solitude of the hills. The
tunnel, after this, was a gross and material sensation; but they joined
the children in trying to hold and keep it, and Ba