A RAILROAD INCIDENT

They were evidently just married and their clothes were painfully new. Alas the baleful eye of a Frenchwoman, an agent for a new kind of shawl strap, was soon on them. She moved up opposite them and commenced to describe the manifold virtues of her new patent. The poor young couple were in despair. First the groom sat on the edge of the seat. He began to edge nearer and nearer to his timid young bride when suddenly the voice of the agent would suddenly sound out loud and clear as she came to some particularly impressive fact and the poor youth would slink out of the seat like some guilty thing. He went to the smoking-room and there the men guyed him, he came back and found the agent still talking. Marriage certainly was a failure as so far as that train was concerned. As we neared Washington they both proceeded to change their stiff new garments for some equally new and stiff and the when we reached the city they went off arm in arm, the skirts of the young bride rustling as they walked and whispering to the passers by, “See aren’t we new?”

I felt by the movement of the train that we were beginning to climb up the mountains. I drew up the shade at the head of my berth and watched. It was a perfect moon-light night. The brightness made the deep pines look all the blacker. Far ahead I saw the rosy light of the engine now lost in the dark pines, now winding snake like up the hill drawing the dark heavy train after it. Every little while a fountain of sparks rose from the engine, fell into the dark mass on either side, lit them for a moment and then was gone. Slowly, slowly it wound up through those strange mysterious shapes that thronged on either side, weird and fantastic in the mystic light of the moon. The engine now stopped panting like an exhausted think g ing and then once more the brakes creaked and groaned and we the serpent-like windings began again.

It is disheartening to come back to Cambridge after a week of the delicious, dreamy south. Baltimore, sunny Baltimore, where no one is in a hurry and the voices of the negroes singing as their carts go lazily by, lull you into the drowsy wakin reveries. It is a strangely silent city, even its busiest thoroughfares seem still and the clanging car-bells only blend with the peaceful silence and do but increase it. To lie on the porch, to listen to the weird strains of Greig’s spring-song, to hear the negro voices in the distance and to let your mind wander idly as it listeth, that is happiness. The lotus-eaters knew not the joys of calm more completely than a Baltimorean. Let us alone for we have the essence of contentment, quiet dreamy, slothful ease in the full sensuous sunshine.

Sleep, the greatest blessing of our miserable race. There is N n othing can be compared with it, It is the essence of all good, all peace all content. What can be equal the bliss of waking up drowsily and knowing you can turn over and sleep again? I love to dwell on that word deep… with its somnolent sl and p. It was a word born to reveal joy to the suffering and greater happiness to him already possessing earth’s fairest fruits. To sleep, to awake and then to sleep again, such is the heaven I picture to myself and to sleep and wake and not be able to sleep again, who can conceive a hell more damnable, a suffering more intense? Sleep, the monarch of all joys, the dearest gift to man, the state of bliss supreme would that I might be in thy embrace for eternity. To sink to sleep to feel, that drowsiness delicious drowsiness all through your frame and then to cuddle in one and sleep, ah the picture is so fair I cannot tear myself away from its contemplation.