y times you
planned that just as soon as the rush and strain of business eased up a
little, you would take the train and go back to the little town to see
what it was like now, and if things had changed much since your day.
But each time when your holidays came, somehow you changed your mind and
went down to Naragansett or Nagahuckett or Nagasomething, and left over
the visit to Mariposa for another time.

It is almost night now. You can still see the trees and the fences and
the farmsteads, but they are fading fast in the twilight. They have
lengthened out the train by this time with a string of flat cars and
freight cars between where we are sitting and the engine. But at every
crossway we can hear the long muffled roar of the whistle, dying to a
melancholy wail that echoes into the woods; the woods, I say, for the
farms are thinning out and the track plunges here and there into great
stretches of bush,--tall tamerack and red scrub willow and with a
tangled undergrowth of bush that has defied for two generations all
attempts to clear it into the form of fields.

Why, look, that great space that seems to open out in the half-dark of
the falling evening,--why, surely yes,--Lake Ossawippi, the big lake,
as they used to call it, from which the river runs down to the smaller
lake,--Lake Wissanotti,--where the town of Mariposa has lain waiting for
you there for thirty years.

This is Lake Ossawippi surely enough. You would know it anywhere by the
broad, still, black water with hardly a ripple, and with the grip of the
coming frost already on it. Such a great sheet of blackness it looks as
the train thunders along the side, swinging the curve of the embankment
at a breakneck speed as it rounds the corner of the lake.

How fast the train goes this autumn night! You have travelled, I know
you have; in the Empire State Express, and the New Limited and the
Maritime Express that holds the record of six hundred whirling miles
from Paris to Marseilles. But what are they to this, this mad career,
this breakneck speed, this thundering roar of the Mariposa local driving
hard to its home! Don't tell me that the speed is only twenty-five miles
an hour. I don't care what it is. I tell you, and you can prove it for
yourself if you will, that that train of mingled flat cars and coaches
that goes tearing into the night, its engine whistle shrieking out its
warning into the silent woods and echoing over the dull still lake, is
the fastes