came as a maiden and grew into womanhood.
But Jethro Bass did not return to Coniston.

CHAPTER XVII

The legends which surround the famous war which we are about to touch
upon are as dim as those of Troy or Tuscany. Decorous chronicles and
biographies and monographs and eulogies exist, bound in leather and
stamped in gold, each lauding its own hero: chronicles written in really
beautiful language, and high-minded and noble, out of which the heroes
come unstained. Horatius holds the bridge, and not a dent in his armor;
and swims the Tiber without getting wet or muddy. Castor and Pollux
fight in the front rank at Lake Regillus, in the midst of all that gore
and slaughter, and emerge all white and pure at the end of the day--but
they are gods.

Out of the classic wars to which we have referred sprang the great Roman
Republic and Empire, and legend runs into authentic and written history.
Just so, parva componere magnis, out of the cloud-wrapped conflicts
of the five railroads of which our own Gaul is composed, emerged one
imperial railroad, authentically and legally written down on the statute
books, for all men to see. We cannot go behind that statute except to
collect the legends and write homilies about the heroes who held the
bridges.

If we were not in mortal terror of the imperial power, and a little
fearful, too, of tiring our readers, we would write out all the legends
we have collected of this first fight for consolidation, and show the
blood, too.

In the statute books of a certain state may be found a number of laws
setting forth the various things that a railroad or railroads may do,
and on the margin of these pages is invariably printed a date, that
being the particular year in which these laws were passed. By a singular
coincidence it is the very year at which we have now arrived in our
story. We do not intend to give a map of the state, or discuss
the merits or demerits of the consolidation of the Central and the
Northwestern and the Truro railroads. Such discussions are not the
province of a novelist, and may all be found in the files of the Tribune
at the State Library. There were, likewise, decisions without number
handed down by the various courts before and after that celebrated
session,--opinions on the validity of leases, on the extension of
railroads, on the rights of individual stockholders--all dry reading
enough.

At the risk of being picked to pieces by the corporation lawyers who m