sil let the boy time
it by his watch. "Now," said Tom, when five minutes were gone, "we are
under the very centre of the mountain." But the tunnel was like all
accomplished facts, all hopes fulfilled, valueless to the soul, and
scarcely appreciable to the sense; and the children emerged at North
Adams with but a mean opinion of that great feat of engineering. Basil
drew a pretty moral from their experience. "If you rode upon a comet you
would be disappointed. Take my advice, and never ride upon a comet.
I shouldn't object to your riding on a little meteor,--you would n't
expect much of that; but I warn you against comets; they are as bad as
tunnels."

The children thought this moral was a joke at their expense, and as they
were a little sleepy they permitted themselves the luxury of feeling
trifled with. But they woke, refreshed and encouraged, from slumbers
that had evidently been unbroken, though they both protested that they
had not slept a wink the whole night, and gave themselves up to wonder
at the interminable levels of Western New York over which the train was
running. The longing to come to an edge, somewhere, that the New England
traveler experiences on this plain, was inarticulate with the children;
but it breathed in the sigh with which Isabel welcomed even the
architectural inequalities of a city into which they drew in the early
morning. This city showed to their weary eyes a noble stretch of river,
from the waters of which lofty piles of buildings rose abruptly; and
Isabel, being left to guess where they were, could think of no other
place so picturesque as Rochester.

"Yes," said her husband; "it is our own Enchanted City. I wonder if that
unstinted hospitality is still dispensed by the good head waiter at the
hotel where we stopped, to bridal parties who have passed the ordeal of
the haughty hotel clerk. I wonder what has become of that hotel clerk.
Has he fallen, through pride, to some lower level, or has he bowed his
arrogant spirit to the demands of advancing civilization, and realized
that he is the servant, and not the master, of the public? I think I've
noticed, since his time, a growing kindness in hotel clerks; or perhaps
I have become of a more impressive presence; they certainly unbend to
me a little more. I should like to go up to our hotel, and try myself on
our old enemy, if he is still there. I can fancy how his shirt front has
expanded in these twelve years past; he has grown a little ba