illars. They shuddered and looked
no more.

The guiltily dreaded examination of baggage at Island Pond took place
at nine o'clock, without costing them a cent of duty or a pang
of conscience. At that charming station the trunks are piled
higgledy-piggledy into a room beside the track, where a few inspectors
with stifling lamps of smoky kerosene await the passengers. There are no
porters to arrange the baggage, and each lady and gentleman digs out his
box, and opens it before the lordly inspector, who stirs up its contents
with an unpleasant hand and passes it. He makes you feel that you are
once more in the land of official insolence, and that, whatever you
are collectively, you are nothing personally. Isabel, who had sent her
husband upon this business with quaking meekness of heart, experienced
the bold indignation of virtue at his account of the way people were
made their own baggage-smashers, and would not be amused when he painted
the vile terrors of each husband as he tremblingly unlocked his wife's
store of contraband.

The morning light showed them the broad elmy meadows of western-looking
Maine; and the Grand Trunk brought them, of course, an hour behind time
into Portland. All breakfastless they hurried aboard the Boston train
on the Eastern Road, and all along that line (which is built to show
how uninteresting the earth can be when she is 'ennuyee' of both sea
and land), Basil's life became a struggle to construct a meal from
the fragmentary opportunities of twenty different stations where they
stopped five minutes for refreshments. At one place he achieved two cups
of shameless chickory, at another three sardines, at a third a dessert
of elderly bananas.

"Home again, home again, from a foreign shore!"

they softly sang as the successive courses of this feast were disposed
of.

The drouth and heat, which they had briefly escaped during their sojourn
in Canada, brooded sovereign upon the tiresome landscape. The red
granite rocks were as if red-hot; the banks of the deep cuts were like
ash heaps; over the fields danced the sultry atmosphere; they fancied
that they almost heard the grasshoppers sing above the rattle of the
train. When they reached Boston at last, they were dustier than most of
us would like to be a hundred years hence. The whole city was equally
dusty; and they found the trees in the square before their own door gray
with dust. The bit of Virginia-creeper planted under the window hu