forty minutes to cover the nineteen miles between
Pistoia and Florence. Moreover, that next train was not till eight in
the evening, and it was now half-past five.

I felt all it was proper to feel on the occasion, and said, if anything,
rather more. Missing a train is a terrible business, even if you miss
nothing else in consequence; and the inner disarray, the blow and wrench
to thoughts and feelings, is most often far worse than any mere
upsetting of arrangements. A chasm suddenly gapes between present and
future, and the river of life flows backwards, if but for a second. It
is most fit and natural to lose one's temper; but the throwing out of so
much moral ballast does not help one to overtake that train. I mention
this, lest I should pass for heartless; and now proceed to say that,
after a few minutes given to wrath and lamentation, I called the cab
back and went in search of a certain very ancient church, containing a
very ancient pulpit, which I had never succeeded in seeing before.
Exactly as on previous occasions, when I got to the farm where the key
of that church was kept, the key had gone to town in the pocket of the
peasant. He would be back, no doubt, at nightfall. But I had not very
much expected the church to be open, so I felt perfectly indifferent at
not seeing the pulpit--nay, if anything, a little relieved, as one does
sometimes when friends prove _not at home_.

I walked up a long steep track to the little battered, black,
fast-locked church, which stands all alone under some oak trees. The
track was through thin hillside woods. Such divine woods! young oak and
acacia, and an undergrowth of grass and ferns, of full-blown roses
thrown across the grass; and here and there, dark in that pale young
green, a cypress. The freshness of evening came all of a sudden, and
with it a scent of every kind of leaf and herb and fern, and the
sweetness of the ripening corn all round. And when I got to the ridge,
slippery with dry cut grass, what should I see in front of me, over the
olive-yards and the wooded slopes, but the walls and towers of
Serravalle, which have beckoned to my fancy almost ever since my
childhood. I sat there a long while in the June sunset and very nearly
missed the second train, which it had seemed intolerable to wait for.

This is an allegory, and I commend its application to the wise and
gentle reader. There are more of such symbolical trains lost than real
ones, even by the most travel