bout the platform on his wooden leg, wearing modestly the
prestige he had won by his flute-playing and by his advantage of
New York experience--"a janitor in the far east, he was," Timothy
Toplady had once told me; in Timothy Toplady himself, who always
meets the trains, but for no reason unless to say an amazed and
reproachful--"Blisterin' Benson! not a soul wants off here"; and in Abel
Halsey, that itinerant preacher, of whom Doctor June had spoken. Abel
was a man of grace, Bible-taught, passioning for service, but within him
his gentle soul burned to travel, and his white horse, Major Mary, and
his road wagon and his route to the door of many a country church were
the sole satisfactions of his wanderlust; and next to these was his
delight to be at a railway station when any train arrived, savouring the
moment of some silent familiarity with distance. I delighted in them
all, and that night, as I looked, I wondered how it would seem to me if
I were returning to it after many years; and I could imagine how my
heart would ache.

As the train moved on, the girl whom Doctor June had called Delia More
turned her head, manifestly to follow for a little way each vanishing
light and figure; and as the conductor came through the car and she
spoke to him, I saw that she was in a tingle of excitement.

"You sure," she asked, "that you stop to the canal draw?"

"Uh?" said the conductor, and when he comprehended, "Every time," he
said, "every time. You be ready when she whistles." He hesitated,
manifestly in some curiosity. "They ain't a house in a mile f'om there,
though," he told her.

"I know that," she gave back crisply.

When I heard her speaking of the canal draw, I found myself wondering;
for a woman is not above wonder. There, where the trains stopped just
perceptibly I myself was wont to leave them for the sake of the mile
walk on the quiet highroad to my house. That, too, though it chanced to
be night, for I am not afraid. But I wondered the more because other
women do fear, and also because mine was the only house between the
canal draw and Friendship Village; and manifestly the shortest way to
reach the village would have been to alight at the station. But I held
my peace, for the affairs of others should be to those others an
efficient disguise; and moreover, the greater part of one's wonder is
wont to come to naught.

Yet, as I seemed to follow this woman out upon the snow and the train
kept impersonally on ac