Presently Mattie found another argument upon her side, that is, the town-side of the question. She had been sitting for half an hour watching the breath of the snorting engine, as it rushed out for a stormy flight over the meek fields, faltered, lingered, faded, melted, was gone. "I told you so," said Mattie: "nothing lasts in the country." "What are you looking at now?" asked Lucy, bending forward to see. "Those white clouds," answered Mattie. "I've been expecting them to do something for ever so long. And they never do anything, though they begin in such a hurry. The green gets the better of them somehow. They melt away into it, and are all gone." "But they do the grass some good, I dare say," returned Lucy--"in hot weather like this especially." "Well, that's not what they set out for, anyhow," said Mattie. "They look always as if they were just going to take grand shapes, and make themselves up into an army, and go out and conquer the world." "And then," suggested Lucy, yielding to the fancy of the child, "they think better of it, and give themselves up, and die into the world to do it good, instead of trampling it under their feet and hurting it." "But how do they come to change their minds so soon?" asked Mattie, beginning to smile; for this was the sort of intellectual duel in which her little soul delighted. "Oh, I don't think they do change their minds. I don't think they ever meant to trample down the world. That was your notion, you know, Mattie." "Well, what do you think they set out for? Why do they rush out so fiercely all at once?" "I will tell you what I think," answered Lucy, without perceiving more than the faintest glimmering of the human reality of what she said, "I think they rush out of the hot place in which they are got ready to do the fields good, in so much pain, that they toss themselves about in strange ways, and people think they are fierce and angry when they are only suffering--shot out into the air from a boiling kettle, you know, Mattie." "Ah! yes; I see," answered Mattie. "That's it, is it? Yes, I dare say. Out of a kettle?" Miriam had drawn near, and was listening, but she could make little of all this, for her hour was not yet come to ask, or to understand such questions. "Yes, that great round thing in front of us is just a great kettle," said Lucy. "Well, I will look at it when we get out. I thought there wasn't much in the country. I suppose we shall get out again, though. This isn't all the country, is it?" Before they reached Hastings, Mattie was fast asleep. It was the evening. She scarcely woke when they stopped for the last time. Lucy carried her from the carriage to a cab, and when they arrived at the lodgings where they were expected, made all haste to get her to bed and asleep.