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A suspicion dawned in me, and became, while I gazed again at the crescent's facades, a glaring certainty; in the light of which I saw that I had been wrong about the old railway-car. Defunct, it was not to die. It was to have a new function. I had once heard that disused railway-cars were convertible into sea-side cottages. But the news had not fired my imagination nor protruded in my memory.
Ay, indeed, there they were; but quantum mutati ab illis! how strangely changed from the noisy, rollicking set I had known them in the railway-car and on board the steamer, ere yet the demon of sea-sickness had claimed them for his own! How ghastly sober they looked now, to be sure!
At parting they embraced twice it had to be done; and then Kostia vanished out of the dream. When dawn broke, Razumov, very still in a hot, stuffy railway-car full of bedding and of sleeping people in all its dimly lighted length, rose quietly, lowered the glass a few inches, and flung out on the great plain of snow a small brown-paper parcel. Then he sat down again muffled up and motionless.
Even the blithest of us and least easily depressed would make a long detour to avoid a stuffed squirrel or a case of pinned butterflies. And you can well imagine with what a sinking of the heart I beheld, this morning, on a road near the coast of Norfolk, a railway-car without wheels. Without wheels though it was, it had motion of a kind; of a kind worse than actual stagnation.
What a hungry, tired, jaded, forlorn mass of humanity it is, as the sun rises on it each morning, in the soiled and breathless railway-car! Yet that household group is America in the making; those are the future kings and queens, the little princes and princesses, of this land.
That which gives tone and character to a general view of the interior of a railway-car in traveling is, from the nature of things, the head-covering of the occupants, for it is this which mostly meets the eye; and no one who has traveled in the United States, for example, can have failed to observe the striking difference between the aspect of a car in the South, where the felt slouch prevails, and of one in the North, where the silk hat is more affected.
"Oh, a man should always know what to do!" she answered petulantly. "Has any one ever tried to hold you up?" "Well, yes," he answered. "Once when I was out in the west of the States, some of the regulation bands tried the game on a train in which I was travelling. But then, you see, the conductor in the railway-car in which I happened to be seated had a six-shooter.
Jim effected his purpose, and returned before light the next morning, and on the following day he took Mr. Balfour and Thede down the river, and delivered them to the man whom he found waiting for them. The programme was carried out in all its details, and two days afterward the two boys were sitting side by side in the railway-car that was hurrying them toward the great city.
As you are jostled through the streets of our populous cities, or take your seat in a crowded railway-car, you are, perhaps, impressed with the general air of rudeness that pervades the scene, a rudeness of a kind so new to the world, that, no old word sufficing to describe it, a new name has been coined, and the swaggering, careless, sensual looking beings, reeking with the fumes of tobacco, that make up the masses of our moving population, are adequately described only by the word rowdy.
More than ever was I intrigued as to the fate of the old railway-car that I had been stalking. It and its lorry had halted on the flat grassy land that fringed the sands. This land was dominated by a crescent of queer little garish tenements, the like of which I had never seen, nor would wish to see again.
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