mokestacks.

--Howells: _Their Wedding Journey_.

The successive images of the preceding selection are clear enough, but
they are bound together by a common purpose, which is the creation of a
single impression. Often, however, a description may present, not a single
impression, but a series of such impressions, to which a unity is given by
the fact that they are all connected with one event, or occur at the same
time, or in the same place. Such a series of impressions is illustrated in
the following:--

It is a phenomenon whose commonness alone prevents it from being most
impressive, that departure of the night-express. The two hundred miles it
is to travel stretch before it, traced by those slender clews, to lose
which is ruin, and about which hang so many dangers. The drawbridges that
gape upon the way, the trains that stand smoking and steaming on the
track, the rail that has borne the wear so long that it must soon snap
under it, the deep cut where the overhanging mass of rocks trembles to its
fall, the obstruction that a pitiless malice may have placed in your path,
you think of these after the journey is done, but they seldom haunt
your fancy while it lasts. The knowledge of your helplessness in any
circumstances is so perfect that it begets a sense of irresponsibility,
almost of security; and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleeping car
and feel yourself hurled forward through the obscurity, you are almost
thankful that you can do nothing, for it is upon this condition only that
you can endure it; and some such condition as this, I suppose, accounts
for many heroic acts in the world. To the fantastic mood which possesses
you equally, sleeping or waking, the stoppages of the train have a weird
character, and Worcester, Springfield, New Haven, and Stamford are rather
points in dreamland than well-known towns of New England. As the train
stops you drowse if you have been waking, and wake if you have been in a
doze; but in any case you are aware of the locomotive hissing and coughing
beyond the station, of flaring gas-jets, of clattering feet of passengers
getting on and off; then of some one, conductor or station master, walking
the whole length of the train; and then you are aware of an insane
satisfaction in renewed flight through the darkness. You think hazily of
the folk in their beds in the town left behind, who stir uneasily at the
sound of your train's departing whistle; and so all is blank vigil o