warm sitting-room, where those two
jaded souls knelt in earnest prayer.

* * * * *

A railway-train was fast in a snow-bank. There it had stuck, unable
to move either backward or forward, since nine o'clock on Wednesday
evening; it was now Thursday morning, the snow was still falling, and
still seemed likely to fall, blocking up more and more the passage
of the unfortunate train. There were two locomotives, with a huge
snow-plough on the forward one, a baggage and express-car, and four cars
filled with passengers. Two hundred people, all anxious, most of them
grumbling, were detained there prisoners, snow-bound and helpless. It
was a hard case, for they were more than two miles distant--with three
feet depth of snow between--from the nearest house. The nearest village
was five miles away at least.

It was Thanksgiving-Day, too, and they had almost all of them "lotted"
upon a New-England Thanksgiving-dinner with old friends, brothers,
fathers, mothers, and grandparents. And there they were, without so much
as a ration of crackers and cheese.

It was noticeable that the women on the train--and there were quite
a number, and most of them with children in their arms or by their
sides--made, as a general rule, less disturbance and confusion than the
men. The children, however, were getting very hungry and noisy by this
Thanksgiving-morning.

In one of the cars were clustered as fine a family-group as the eye
would desire to rest upon. It consisted of a somewhat large and florid,
but firmly and compactly built man of thirty years or thereabout,
a woman, evidently his wife and apparently some two or three years
younger, and three beautiful children.

The man was large in frame, without being coarse, with a chest broad and
ample as a gymnast's, and with arms whose muscular power was evident at
every movement. His hair and beard (which latter he wore full, as was
just beginning to be the custom) were dark brown in color, and thick and
strong almost to coarseness in texture; his eye was a clear hazel, full,
quick, and commanding, sometimes almost fierce; while an aquiline nose,
full, round forehead, and a complexion bronzed by long exposure to all
sorts of weather, gave him an aspect to be noted in any throng he might
be thrown into. There was a constant air of pride and determination
about the man, which softened, however, whenever his glance fell upon
wife or children. At such times his fac