good-by and had
gone fifty yards, perhaps, when Twichell said he had forgotten something
(I doubted it) and must go back. When he rejoined me he was silent, and
this alarmed me, because I had not seen an example of it before. He
seemed quite uncomfortable, and I asked him what the trouble was. He
said he had been inspired to give the girl a pleasant surprise, and so
had gone back and said to her--

"That young fellow's name is not Wilkinson--that's Mark Twain."

She did not lose her mind; she did not exhibit any excitement at all,
but said quite simply, quite tranquilly,

"Tell it to the marines, Mr. Peters--if that should happen to be _your_
name."

It was very pleasant to meet her again. We were white-headed, but she
was not; in the sweet and unvexed spiritual atmosphere of the Bermudas
one does not achieve gray hairs at forty-eight.

I had a dream last night, and of course it was born of association, like
nearly everything else that drifts into a person's head, asleep or
awake. On board ship, on the passage down, Twichell was talking about
the swiftly developing possibilities of aerial navigation, and he quoted
those striking verses of Tennyson's which forecast a future when
air-borne vessels of war shall meet and fight above the clouds and
redden the earth below with a rain of blood. This picture of carnage and
blood and death reminded me of something which I had read a fortnight
ago--statistics of railway accidents compiled by the United States
Government, wherein the appalling fact was set forth that on our 200,000
miles of railway we annually kill 10,000 persons outright and injure
80,000. The war-ships in the air suggested the railway horrors, and
three nights afterward the railway horrors suggested my dream. The work
of association was going on in my head, unconsciously, all that time. It
was an admirable dream, what there was of it.

In it I saw a funeral procession; I saw it from a mountain peak; I saw
it crawling along and curving here and there, serpentlike, through a
level vast plain. I seemed to see a hundred miles of the procession, but
neither the beginning of it nor the end of it was within the limits of
my vision. The procession was in ten divisions, each division marked by
a sombre flag, and the whole represented ten years of our railway
activities in the accident line; each division was composed of 80,000
cripples, and was bearing its own year's 10,000 mutilated corpses to the
grave: in the a