out of the car window at an apathetic brakeman who languidly
gazed down the shining rails. For no cause that could be guessed, the
train had now been resting nearly half an hour. The colored porter had
ceased to perform prodigies by shutting between the upper berth and the
wall three times as many blankets, mattresses, board partitions, and
other paraphernalia as one would have thought the space could possibly
contain, and was sitting in the corner section reflectively chewing a
toothpick. There appeared to be a distressing lack of interest in the
train on the part of all its proximate officials; no one seemed ready
to alter the status quo.

Only a few miles to the eastward the roofs of Boston and the golden
dome of the Capitol glittered in the morning sun, and there were the
bright rails stretching clean and straight up to the very gates of the
city. Railroading was a silly business anyway, thought Smith. An
express train should be consistent, and not suddenly decide to become a
landmark instead of a mobile and dynamic agent. He almost wished he
had taken his ticket by the Fall River boat--as he probably would have
done had he been a Bostonian.

"Without reference to its political aspect," he reflected, "I believe
strongly in water. I might have been deeply disturbed if there had
been a ground swell or a cross sea going around Point Judith, but I
wouldn't have been threatened with approaching senile decay en route."

Smith was from New York. The elderly Bostonian who shared his section
had thought so from the first. He had guessed it when Smith took out
for the second time his watch and replaced it with a snap; he had felt
his belief strengthened when his fellow traveler raised the sash and
looked impatiently up the idle track; and he had dismissed all doubt
when Smith, conversing with the apathetic brakeman, crisply indicated
his desire to return from a study of still life to the moving picture
show for which he had paid admission. The elderly Bostonian had
observed many New Yorkers, but it had never ceased to be a source of
surprise to him why they all should be so incessantly restless with an
electric anxiety to be getting somewhere else. To his own thinking one
place was very much the same as another,--with the exception of
Boston,--and a comfortable inertia was by no means to be condemned. If
people were waiting for one, and one didn't appear, they merely waited
a little longer--that was all. If et