ce in front of it.

It was to be one of the grandest and finest houses that thought
could conceive; much finer, in true reality, than that vast palace of
sandstone with the porte cochere and the sweeping conservatories that
you afterwards built in the costlier part of the city.

But if you have half forgotten Mariposa, and long since lost the way to
it, you are only like the greater part of the men here in this Mausoleum
Club in the city. Would you believe it that practically every one of
them came from Mariposa once upon a time, and that there isn't one of
them that doesn't sometimes dream in the dull quiet of the long evening
here in the club, that some day he will go back and see the place.

They all do. Only they're half ashamed to own it.

Ask your neighbour there at the next table whether the partridge that
they sometimes serve to you here can be compared for a moment to the
birds that he and you, or he and some one else, used to shoot as boys in
the spruce thickets along the lake. Ask him if he ever tasted duck that
could for a moment be compared to the black ducks in the rice marsh
along the Ossawippi. And as for fish, and fishing,--no, don't ask him
about that, for if he ever starts telling you of the chub they used
to catch below the mill dam and the green bass that used to lie in the
water-shadow of the rocks beside the Indian's Island, not even the long
dull evening in this club would be long enough for the telling of it.

But no wonder they don't know about the five o'clock train for Mariposa.
Very few people know about it. Hundreds of them know that there is a
train that goes out at five o'clock, but they mistake it. Ever so many
of them think it's just a suburban train. Lots of people that take it
every day think it's only the train to the golf grounds, but the joke
is that after it passes out of the city and the suburbs and the golf
grounds, it turns itself little by little into the Mariposa train,
thundering and pounding towards the north with hemlock sparks pouring
out into the darkness from the funnel of it.

Of course you can't tell it just at first. All those people that are
crowding into it with golf clubs, and wearing knickerbockers and flat
caps, would deceive anybody. That crowd of suburban people going home
on commutation tickets and sometimes standing thick in the aisles, those
are, of course, not Mariposa people. But look round a little bit and
you'll find them easily enough. Here and th