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If there be a good trail, if there be convenient stopping-places, if nothing go wrong, one may travel without special risk and with no extraordinary discomfort at 50° below zero and a good deal lower. I have since that time made a short day's run at 62° below, and once travelled for two or three hours on a stretch at 65° below.
The homeward journey was a repetition of the journey out; there were the same idle crowds, the same displays of filthy viands at the stopping-places, the same heat and dust and delays. Longorio's lieutenant hovered near, and José, as before, was news-gatherer. Hour after hour they crept toward the border, until at last they were again laid out on a siding for an indefinite wait.
Our stopping-places were thronged with soldiers, some of whom came through the cars asking for newspapers that contained accounts of the battle between the Merrimack and Monitor, which had been fought the day before.
They were nearing the cross-roads as he spoke, and the rude outline of the wayside cross loomed out of the shadows directly ahead. "I couldn't tell you that, neither. I always stop at the cross-roads, in and out. It's one of my regular stopping-places. Come to think of it, though, somebody did get out at the cross-roads last night." "A man or woman?" asked Barrant with eagerness. "A woman.
And mingled with us on the boat would be country people traveling to or from town, pedlers, parties going to the stopping-places of the passenger boats, people loading and unloading freight, drovers with live stock for the market, and all sorts of queer characters and odd fish who haunted the canal as waterside characters infest the water-front of ports.
After joking them sufficiently, the Baltimoreans kindly gave up their seats and mounted to the top. At the towns at which we stopped to change horses, the boys who collected around were entertained with wonderful stories by our friends from Baltimore. Just outside of one of these stopping-places we passed an old gentleman, probably refugeeing, who wore a tall beaver hat and rode a piebald pony.
But that is not a truthful definition when applied to the epochs of McGill, for they have all been times of progress. With steps sometimes accelerated, sometimes slow, sometimes even faltering, its movement has been always onward. There have been no stopping-places in its life.
"Well done, matey," and sundry other boisterous tokens of applause. Nothing would content the party but that Smith should tell the story of his flight. They listened spell-bound as he related his experiences at the various stopping-places, and his adventures at sea.
He adds, "the great depth of water, not only here, but that which is generally found washing the shores of this very broken and divided country, must ever be considered a peculiar circumstance, and a great inconvenience to its navigation; we, however, found a sufficient number of stopping-places to answer all our purposes, and in general without going far out of our way."
As a writer in "The Nation" has lately remarked, it is simply and only because the American nation like to have unventilated cars, and to be fed on pie and coffee at stopping-places, that nothing better is known to our travelers; if there were any marked dislike of such a state of things on the part of the people, it would not exist.
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