had now become.

He amused himself in mentally following the piano on its way to the Sea
Board & Hill Country R. R. freight-depot, which he was quite able to do
from a habit of Boston formed during his four years in the academic
course and his three years in the law-school at Harvard. He knew that it
would cross Boylston into Charles Street, and keep along that level to
Cambridge; then it would turn into McLane Street, and again into Lynde,
by this means avoiding the grades as much as possible, and arriving
through Causeway Street at the long, low freight-depot of the S. B. & H.
C., where it would be the first thing unloaded from the truck. It would
stand indefinitely on the outer platform; and then, when the men in
flat, narrow-peaked silk caps and grease-splotched overalls got round to
it, with an air of as much personal indifference as if they were mere
mechanical agencies, it would be pulled and pushed into the dimness of
the interior, cool, and pleasantly smelling of pine, and hemp, and
flour, and dried fruit, and coffee, and tar, and leather, and fish.
There it would abide, indefinitely again, till in the same large
impersonal way it was pulled and pushed out on the platform beside the
track, where a freight-car marked for the Hill Country division of the
road, with devices intelligible to the train-men, had been shunted down
by a pony engine in obedience to mystical semaphoric gesticulations,
from the brakeman risking his life for the purpose among the rails,
addressed to the engineer keeping his hand on the pulse of the
locomotive, and his head out of the cab window to see how near he could
come to killing the brakeman without doing it.

Gaites witnessed the whole drama with an interest that held him
suspended between the gulps and morsels of his breakfast, and at times
quite arrested the processes of mastication and deglutition. That pretty
girl's name on the slope of the piano-case continued to look at him from
the end of the truck; it smiled at him from the outer platform of the
freight-house; it entreated him with a charming trepidation from the dim
interior; again it smiled on the inner platform; and then, from the
safety of the car, where the case found itself ensconced among freight
of a neat and agreeable character, the name had the effect of intrepidly
blowing him a kiss as the train-man slid the car doors together and
fastened them. He drew a long breath when the train had backed and
bumped down to t