nd concluded
that he would let the rustics drag the ponds and the river, and scour
the woods and swamps, while he himself went to the seaport town from
which she would without doubt sail if she had formed the project he
thought on the whole most probable.

Thus it was that we found him hurrying to the nearest station to catch
the train to Boston, while they were all looking for traces of the
missing girl nearer home. In the cars he made the most suggestive
inquiries he could frame, to stir up the gentlemanly conductor's memory.
Had any young fellow been on the train within a day or two, who had
attracted his notice? Smooth, handsome face, black eyes, short black
hair, new clothes, not fitting very well, looked away when he paid his
fare, had a soft voice like a woman's,--had he seen anybody answering
to some such description as this? The gentlemanly conductor had not
noticed,--was always taking up and setting down way-passengers,--might
have had such a young man aboard,--there was two or three students one
day in the car singing college songs,--he did n't care how folks looked
if they had their tickets ready,--and minded their own business,--and,
so saying, he poked a young man upon whose shoulder a ringleted head was
reclining with that delightful abandon which the railroad train seems to
provoke in lovely woman,--"Fare!"

It is a fine thing to be set down in a great, overcrowded hotel, where
they do not know you, looking dusty, and for the moment shabby, with
nothing but a carpet-bag in your hand, feeling tired, and anything but
clean, and hungry, and worried, and every way miserable and mean, and
to undergo the appraising process of the gentleman in the office, who,
while he shoves the book round to you for your name, is making a hasty
calculation as to how high up he can venture to doom you. But Murray
Bradshaw's plain dress and carpet-bag were more than made up for by the
air and tone which imply the habit of being attended to. The clerk saw
that in a glance, and, as he looked at the name and address in the book,
spoke sharply in the explosive dialect of his tribe,--

"Jun! ta'tha'genlm'n'scarpetbag'n'showhimupt'thirtyone!"

When Cyprian Eveleth reached the same hotel late at night, he appeared
in his best clothes and with a new valise; but his amiable countenance
and gentle voice and modest manner sent him up two stories higher, where
he found himself in a room not much better than a garret, feeling lonely
eno