t train in the whole world.

Yes, and the best too,--the most comfortable, the most reliable, the
most luxurious and the speediest train that ever turned a wheel.

And the most genial, the most sociable too. See how the passengers all
turn and talk to one another now as they get nearer and nearer to the
little town. That dull reserve that seemed to hold the passengers in
the electric suburban has clean vanished and gone. They are
talking,--listen,--of the harvest, and the late election, and of how
the local member is mentioned for the cabinet and all the old familiar
topics of the sort. Already the conductor has changed his glazed hat for
an ordinary round Christie and you can hear the passengers calling him
and the brakesman "Bill" and "Sam" as if they were all one family.

What is it now--nine thirty? Ah, then we must be nearing the town,--this
big bush that we are passing through, you remember it surely as the
great swamp just this side of the bridge over the Ossawippi? There is
the bridge itself, and the long roar of the train as it rushes sounding
over the trestle work that rises above the marsh. Hear the clatter as we
pass the semaphores and switch lights! We must be close in now!

What? it feels nervous and strange to be coming here again after all
these years? It must indeed. No, don't bother to look at the reflection
of your face in the window-pane shadowed by the night outside. Nobody
could tell you now after all these years. Your face has changed in these
long years of money-getting in the city. Perhaps if you had come back
now and again, just at odd times, it wouldn't have been so.

There,--you hear it?--the long whistle of the locomotive, one, two,
three! You feel the sharp slackening of the train as it swings round
the curve of the last embankment that brings it to the Mariposa station.
See, too, as we round the curve, the row of the flashing lights, the
bright windows of the depot.

How vivid and plain it all is. Just as it used to be thirty years ago.
There is the string of the hotel 'buses, drawn up all ready for the
train, and as the train rounds in and stops hissing and panting at the
platform, you can hear above all other sounds the cry of the brakesmen
and the porters:

"MARIPOSA! MARIPOSA!"

And as we listen, the cry grows fainter and fainter in our ears and
we are sitting here again in the leather chairs of the Mausoleum Club,
talking of the little Town in the Sunshine that once we knew.