hich she experienced over this unexpected way out of
her difficulty, she felt renewed strength and confidence that surely
would see her through. Half an hour ago she had been lost in a welter
of despair; but she was all right now. Everything was all right now.
The story would get through yet; nothing could stop it now. And,
protected by the roar of the wheels, she cried a little in relief.

Just a moment of this, however. She was not ordinarily the crying
kind. The furnace glare presently filled the whole cab as the fireman
shovelled in more coal, and the novelty of her surroundings pressed
upon her to the temporary exclusion of everything else.

Wasn't the din something awful? She had no idea that a locomotive was
such a noisy place. She soon found herself getting more used to it and
watched the engineer with wonder and interest. Her idea of an
engineer, she found, had been formed by the illustrations in the
magazines; she had pictured him in her mind as a man who sat with hand
constantly on the throttle or the levers or whatever it was, bent far
forward, peering keenly and steadily from beneath the visor of his
greasy cap with eyes riveted unswervingly on every yard of track ahead.
She was surprised, therefore, to find that this engineer seemed almost
careless of attitude, leaning back in his cushioned seat, body jogging
loosely to the motions of the great machine. It was only occasionally
that he seemed to arouse enough interest to lean out of the window, and
scarcely ever did he touch the levers in front of him. Once he
actually got down from his seat and came over to the fireman's side to
shout something in that grimy individual's ear, and all the while they
were thundering along without any lessening of speed. What if
something should appear suddenly on the track in front of them? Her
heart leaped at the thought. She was sure he could not get back in
time to stop, and it was all very surprising to her.

Curiously her eyes roved over all the levers and queer instruments.
Certainly an engineer must have to carry a terrible lot in his head to
know how to manage them. There was a little knob, for instance; if she
were to give it a pull, something would happen somewhere, an explosion
perhaps,--dear knows what! She watched the hand of the indicator on
the boilerhead fluttering around the figure 190. She studied the
liquid in the glass tubes. A little apparatus, too, that looked like a
small whistle.