--these things she laid by silently in her heart. And the woman
in the gray bonnet never knew the half that she had done.

After taking one through wildernesses of beauty, after whirling one past
nooks where one could gladly linger whole summers, it is strange at what
commonplace and graceless termini these railroads contrive to land one.
Lovely Wells River, where the road makes its sharp angle, and runs back
again until it strikes out eastward through the valley of the
Ammonoosuc; where the waters leap to each other, and the hills bend
round in majestic greeting; where our young party cried out, in an
ignorance at once blessed and pathetic, "Oh, if Littleton should only be
like this, or if we could stop here!"--yet where one cannot stop,
because here there is no regular stage connection, and nothing else to
be found, very probably, that travelers might want, save the outdoor
glory,--Wells River and Woodsville were left behind, lying in the
evening stillness of June,--in the grand and beautiful disregard of
things greater than the world is rushing by to seek,--and for an hour
more they threaded through fair valley sweeps and reaches, past solitary
hillside clearings and detached farms and the most primitive of mountain
hamlets, where the limit and sparseness of neighborhood drew forth from
a gentleman sitting behind them--come, doubtless, from some suburban
home, where numberless household wants kept horse and wagon perpetually
on the way for city or village--the suggestive query, "I wonder what
they do here when they're out of saleratus?"

They brought them up, as against a dead wall of dreariness and
disappointment, at the Littleton station. It had been managed as it
always is: the train had turned most ingeniously into a corner whence
there was scarcely an outlook upon anything of all the magnificence that
must yet be lying close about them; and here was only a tolerably
well-populated country town, filled up to just the point that excludes
the picturesque and does not attain to the highly civilized. And into
the heart of this they were to be borne, and to be shut up there this
summer night, with the full moon flooding mountain and river, and the
woods whispering up their peace to heaven.

It was bad enough, but worse came. The hotel coach was waiting, and they
hastened to secure their seats, giving their checks to the driver, who
disappeared with a handful of these and others, leaving his horses with
the reins tie