down
there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days before,
keeping his bundle and his stick by his side. People groaned, children
cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place
creaked, and everything was being shaken so that in one's little box one
dared not lift one's head. He had lost touch with his only companion (a
young man from the same valley, he said), and all the time a great
noise of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell--boom! boom! An awful
sickness overcame him, even to the point of making him neglect his
prayers. Besides, one could not tell whether it was morning or evening.
It seemed always to be night in that place.

"Before that he had been travelling a long, long time on the iron track.
He looked out of the window, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it,
and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads seemed to fly
round and round about him till his head swam. He gave me to understand
that he had on his passage beheld uncounted multitudes of people--whole
nations--all dressed in such clothes as the rich wear. Once he was made
to get out of the carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in a
house of bricks with his bundle under his head; and once for many hours
he had to sit on a floor of flat stones dozing, with his knees up and
with his bundle between his feet. There was a roof over him, which
seemed made of glass, and was so high that the tallest mountain-pine
he had ever seen would have had room to grow under it. Steam-machines
rolled in at one end and out at the other. People swarmed more than you
can see on a feast-day round the miraculous Holy Image in the yard of
the Carmelite Convent down in the plains where, before he left his home,
he drove his mother in a wooden cart--a pious old woman who wanted to
offer prayers and make a vow for his safety. He could not give me an
idea of how large and lofty and full of noise and smoke and gloom, and
clang of iron, the place was, but some one had told him it was called
Berlin. Then they rang a bell, and another steam-machine came in, and
again he was taken on and on through a land that wearied his eyes by its
flatness without a single bit of a hill to be seen anywhere. One more
night he spent shut up in a building like a good stable with a litter
of straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst a lot of men, of whom
not one could understand a single word he said. In the morning they
were all led d