the woods the windows of the halted train,
where the faces appeared of two men of manifestly different types, but
still alien to the country in dress, features, and accent.

Two negroes were slowly loading the engine tender from a woodpile. The
rich brown smoke of the turpentine knots was filling the train with its
stinging fragrance. The elder of the two Northern passengers, with sharp
New England angles in his face, impatiently glanced at his watch.

"Of all created shiftlessness, this beats everything! Why couldn't we
have taken in enough wood to last the ten miles farther to the terminus
when we last stopped? And why in thunder, with all this firing up, can't
we go faster?"

The younger passenger, whose quiet, well-bred face seemed to indicate
more discipline of character, smiled.

"If you really wish to know and as we've only ten miles farther to
go--I'll show you WHY. Come with me."

He led the way through the car to the platform and leaped down. Then he
pointed significantly to the rails below them. His companion started.
The metal was scaling off in thin strips from the rails, and in some
places its thickness had been reduced a quarter of an inch, while in
others the projecting edges were torn off, or hanging in iron shreds,
so that the wheels actually ran on the narrow central strip. It seemed
marvelous that the train could keep the track.

"NOW you know why we don't go more than five miles an hour, and--are
thankful that we don't," said the young traveler quietly.

"But this is disgraceful!--criminal!" ejaculated the other nervously.

"Not at their rate of speed," returned the younger man. "The crime would
be in going faster. And now you can understand why a good deal of the
other progress in this State is obliged to go as slowly over their
equally decaying and rotten foundations. You can't rush things here as
we do in the North."

The other passenger shrugged his shoulders as they remounted the
platform, and the train moved on. It was not the first time that the two
fellow-travelers had differed, although their mission was a common
one. The elder, Mr. Cyrus Drummond, was the vice-president of a large
Northern land and mill company, which had bought extensive tracts of
land in Georgia, and the younger, Colonel Courtland, was the consulting
surveyor and engineer for the company. Drummond's opinions were a good
deal affected by sectional prejudice, and a self-satisfied and righteous
ignorance of the ac