Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its

passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the

engine; and as it was for this we had been waiting, we were

summoned by the cry of "All aboard!" and went on again upon our

way. The whole line, it appeared, was topsy-turvy; an accident at

midnight having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear. We paid

for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that day. Fruit we

could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at

some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale;

but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at every

opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow

my way to the counter.

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day. There

was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river

valleys among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a

sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon. It had an inland

sweetness and variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods,

rivers, and the delved earth. These, though in so far a country,

were airs from home. I stood on the platform by the hour; and as I

saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway

and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in

the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the

plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light

dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface,

I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who

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