n all her anguished journeyings that had
preceded it. Hurtling through the air, it seemed, with a sense of fierce
speed, the varied clangors of the train, the ringing of the rails, the
frequent hoarse blasts of the whistle, the jangling of the metallic
fixtures, the jarring of the window-panes, all were keenly differentiated
by her exacerbated and sensitive perceptions, and each had its own
peculiar irritation. She scarcely hoped that she might sleep, and it was
only with a dutiful sense of conserving her strength and exerting the
utmost power of her will in the endeavor, that she lay down when her
berth was prepared. But the seclusion, the darkness within the curtains,
oppressed her, for unwittingly the sights and sounds of the outer world
had an influence to make her quit of herself, in a measure, and to focus
her mind on some trivial object of the immediate present. She drew the
blind at the window that she might see the scurrying landscape--the
fields, the woods, the river--and now and again the sparkling lights of a
city, looking in the distance as if some constellation, richly instarred
with golden glamours, had fallen and lay amidst the purple glooms of the
hills. For these elevations, and the frequent tunnels as the dawn drew
near, gave token that the mountains were not distant; the great central
basin of Tennessee lay far to the west; the engine was often climbing a
steep grade, as she noted from the sound. She was going to the mountains,
to the mountains--to meet what? Sometimes she clasped her hands and
prayed aloud in her fear and heart-ache and woe. Then she blessed the
many clamors of the train that had lacerated her tenderest fibres, for
they deadened the sound of her piteous plaints, and she was a proud woman
who would fain that none heard these heart-throbs of anguish but the
pitying God Himself.

She must have slept from time to time, she thought, for she was refreshed
and calmer when she looked forth from the window and beheld the
resplendent glories of the sunrise amidst the Great Smoky Mountains.
Vast, far-stretching, lofty, as impressive as the idea of eternity, as
awesome as the menace of doom, as silent as the unimagined purposes of
creation, they lifted their august summits. They showed a deep, restful
verdure in the foreground, and in more distant reaches assumed the
blandest enrichments of blue, fading and fading to mere illusions of
ranges, and finally dreaming away to the misty mirages of the