w New York with the critical eye of a
Bostonian.

Her first experience was significant; and in the course of a three-mile
drive down Broadway, she had time, while standing in the middle of an
omnibus, where were seated nine young gentlemen, for much complacent
comparison of the manners of the two cities. Indeed, after twelve hours
of attentive study, Miselle discovered but two points of superiority in
the New Babylon over the Modern Athens, and these were chocolate-creams
and policemen: the first were delicious, the last civil.

Six o'clock arrived, and the "Lightning Express," over the Erie Railway,
bore, among other less important freight, Miselle and her fortunes. But,
unfortunately for the interest of this narrative, she had unwittingly
selected an "off-night" for her journey; neither horrible accident nor
raid of bold marauders enlivened the occasion; and undisturbed, the
reckless passengers slept throughout the night, as men have slept who
knew that a scaffold waited for them with the morning's light.

Only Miselle could not rest. The steady rapidity of motion,--the
terrible power of this force that man has made his own, and yet not so
wholly his own but that it may at any moment break from his control,
asserting itself master,--the dim light and motionless figures about
her,--all these things wrought upon her fancy, until, through the gray
mist of morning, great round hills stood up at either hand with deep
valleys between, from whose nestling hamlets lights began to twinkle out
as if great swarms of fireflies sheltered there. Then, as morning broke,
the wild scenery, growing more distinct, told the traveller that she was
far from home.

Gray and craggy hills, wild ravines, stormy mountain-streams, dizzy
heights where the traveller looking down remembered Tarpeia, gloomy
caverns, suggesting Simms's theory of an interior world,--none of these
were homelike; and Miselle began to fancy herself an explorer, a
Franklin, a Fremont, a Speke, until the train stopped at Hornellsville
for breakfast, and she was reminded, while watching the operations of
her fellow-passengers, of Du Chaillu peeping from behind tree-trunks at
the domestic pursuits of the gorilla.

About noon the cars stopped at Corry, Pennsylvania, the entrance of the
oil region and terminus of the Oil Creek Railway; and Miselle, stepping
from the train into a dense cloud of driving rain and oily men, felt one
sudden pang of doubt as to her future cours