itement that comes as one watches the people come and
go, and hears the engine pound and give a long drawn whistle. For a
child watching through a hole in the fence above the yard, it is a
wonder world of mystery and movement. The child loves all the noise,
and then it loves the silence of the wind that comes before the full
rush of the pounding train, that bursts out from the tunnel where it
lost itself and all its noise in darkness, and the child loves all the
smoke, that sometimes comes in rings, and always puffs with fire and
blue color.

For Melanctha the yard was full of the excitement of many men, and
perhaps a free and whirling future.

Melanctha came here very often and watched the men and all the things
that were so busy working. The men always had time for, "Hullo sis,
do you want to sit on my engine," and, "Hullo, that's a pretty lookin'
yaller girl, do you want to come and see him cookin."

All the colored porters liked Melanctha. They often told her exciting
things that had happened; how in the West they went through big
tunnels where there was no air to breathe, and then out and winding
around edges of great canyons on thin high spindling trestles, and
sometimes cars, and sometimes whole trains fell from the narrow
bridges, and always up from the dark places death and all kinds of
queer devils looked up and laughed in their faces. And then they would
tell how sometimes when the train went pounding down steep slippery
mountains, great rocks would racket and roll down around them, and
sometimes would smash in the car and kill men; and as the porters told
these stories their round, black, shining faces would grow solemn,
and their color would go grey beneath the greasy black, and their eyes
would roll white in the fear and wonder of the things they could scare
themselves by telling.

There was one, big, serious, melancholy, light brown porter who often
told Melanctha stories, for he liked the way she had of listening with
intelligence and sympathetic feeling, when he told how the white men
in the far South tried to kill him because he made one of them who was
drunk and called him a damned nigger, and who refused to pay money for
his chair to a nigger, get off the train between stations. And then
this porter had to give up going to that part of the Southern country,
for all the white men swore that if he ever came there again they
would surely kill him.

Melanctha liked this serious, melancholy light br