f the Pullmans and diners of the night express
going north to the mining country, the windows flashing with brilliant
light, and within them a vista of cut glass and snow-white table linen,
smiling negroes and millionaires with napkins at their chins whirling
past in the driving snowstorm.

I can tell you the people of Mariposa are proud of the trains, even if
they don't stop! The joy of being on the main line lifts the Mariposa
people above the level of their neighbours in such places as Tecumseh
and Nichols Corners into the cosmopolitan atmosphere of through traffic
and the larger life. Of course, they have their own train, too--the
Mariposa Local, made up right there in the station yard, and running
south to the city a hundred miles away. That, of course, is a real
train, with a box stove on end in the passenger car, fed with cordwood
upside down, and with seventeen flat cars of pine lumber set between the
passenger car and the locomotive so as to give the train its full impact
when shunting.

Outside of Mariposa there are farms that begin well but get thinner and
meaner as you go on, and end sooner or later in bush and swamp and the
rock of the north country. And beyond that again, as the background of
it all, though it's far away, you are somehow aware of the great pine
woods of the lumber country reaching endlessly into the north.

Not that the little town is always gay or always bright in the sunshine.
There never was such a place for changing its character with the season.
Dark enough and dull it seems of a winter night, the wooden sidewalks
creaking with the frost, and the lights burning dim behind the shop
windows. In olden times the lights were coal oil lamps; now, of course,
they are, or are supposed to be, electricity, brought from the power
house on the lower Ossawippi nineteen miles away. But, somehow, though
it starts off as electricity from the Ossawippi rapids, by the time it
gets to Mariposa and filters into the little bulbs behind the frosty
windows of the shops, it has turned into coal oil again, as yellow and
bleared as ever.

After the winter, the snow melts and the ice goes out of the lake, the
sun shines high and the shanty-men come down from the lumber woods and
lie round drunk on the sidewalk outside of Smith's Hotel--and that's
spring time. Mariposa is then a fierce, dangerous lumber town,
calculated to terrorize the soul of a newcomer who does not
understand that this also is only an app