"Thanks," he faltered; "I didn't hear you. The
train makes such a noise, and I must have been dozing."

He looked about him. The night aspect, as of a tramps' lodging-house,
had quite disappeared from the car. Everybody was sitting up; and the
more impatient were beginning to collect their bundles and hand-bags
from the racks and floor. An expressman came through, jangling a huge
bunch of brass checks on leathern thongs over his arm, and held parley
with passengers along the aisle. Outside, citified streets, with stores
and factories, were alternating in the moving panorama with open fields;
and, even as he looked, these vacant spaces ceased altogether, and
successive regular lines of pavement, between two tall rows of houses
all alike, began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing off out
of view, for all the world like the avenues of hop-poles he remembered
as a boy. Then was a long tunnel, its darkness broken at stated
intervals by brief bursts of daylight from overhead, and out of this all
at once the train drew up its full length in some vast, vaguely lighted
enclosure, and stopped.

"Yes, this is New York," said the man, folding up his paper, and
springing to his feet. The narrow aisle was filled with many others who
had been prompter still; and Theron stood, bag in hand, waiting till
this energetic throng should have pushed itself bodily past him forth
from the car. Then he himself made his way out, drifting with a sense of
helplessness in their resolute wake. There rose in his mind the sudden
conviction that he would be too late. All the passengers in the forward
sleepers would be gone before he could get there. Yet even this terror
gave him no new power to get ahead of anybody else in the tightly packed
throng.

Once on the broad platform, the others started off briskly; they all
seemed to know just where they wanted to go, and to feel that no instant
of time was to be lost in getting there. Theron himself caught some of
this urgent spirit, and hurled himself along in the throng with reckless
haste, knocking his bag against peoples' legs, but never pausing for
apology or comment until he found himself abreast of the locomotive at
the head of the train. He drew aside from the main current here, and
began searching the platform, far and near, for those he had travelled
so far to find.

The platform emptied itself. Theron lingered on in puzzled hesitation,
and looked about him. In the whole immense stat