ite splendor, mystic and wonderful, sixty miles away, but seeming
in that lucent air to be brooding closely over all the varied loveliness
below.

Though nine o'clock had struck on the brisk little station-clock, there
was still a tang of night chill left. The station-agent came out,
carrying a chair which he set down in the sunniest corner of the
platform. He looked to be hardly more than a boy, but firm-knit and
self-confident. His features were regular, his fairish hair slightly
wavy, and in his expression there was a curious and incongruous
suggestion of settledness, of acceptance, of satisfaction with life as
he met it, which an observer of men would have found difficult to
reconcile with his youth and the obvious intelligence of the face. His
eyes were masked by deeply browned glasses, for he was bent upon
literary pursuits, witness the corpulent, paper-covered volume under his
arm. Adjusting his chair to the angle of ease, he tipped back against
the wall and made tentative entry into his book.

What a monumental work was that in the treasure-filled recesses of which
the young explorer was straightway lost to the outer world! No human
need but might find its contentment therein. Spread forth in its
alluringly illustrated pages was the whole universe reduced to the
purchasable. It was a perfect and detailed microcosm of the world of
trade, the cosmogony of commerce _in petto_. The style was brief, pithy,
pregnant; the illustrations--oh, wonder of wonders!--unfailingly apt to
the text. He who sat by the Damascus Road of old marveling as the
caravans rolled dustily past bearing "emeralds and wheat, honey and oil
and balm, fine linen and embroidered goods, iron, cassia and calamus,
white wool, ivory and ebony," beheld or conjectured no such wondrous
offerings as were here gathered, collected, and presented for the
patronage of this heir of all the ages, between the gay-hued covers of
the great Sears-Roebuck Semiannual Mail-Order Catalogue. Its happy
possessor need but cross the talisman with the ready magic of a postal
money order and the swift genii of transportation would attend, servile
to his call, to deliver the commanded treasures at his very door.

But the young reader was not purposefully shopping in this vast
market-place of print. Rather he was adventuring idly, indulging the
amateur spirit, playing a game of hit-or-miss, seeking oracles in those
teeming pages. Therefore he did not turn to the pink insert,