I've lived in Homeburg thirty-five years and more, and the 4:11 train has been tangled up in my biography all the way. I remember the first time I ever rode on it. The cars were funny-looking coops then, and the engine had a sixty-gallon smokestack. I was four, and I yelled with fear when the train came in and kept it up for the first twenty miles after they lugged me on board. The conductor chucked me under the chin and gave me his punch to play with. He was a young man then. He'd carried my father and mother on their wedding journey, and twenty years after that first ride of mine he carried me and my wife on our wedding journey. The other day we gave our oldest girl two dollars and sent her on her first trip down to Jonesville, by herself. Old Ball was on the train, and he grinned at me and promised to take good care of her. He's pretty gray now, but I hope he stays long enough to start another generation of our family on its travels. I went to my first circus, to Jonesville, on old Number Eleven. And I went down there at sixteen, a member of the Republican Club, with a torch, and the proudest boy in the State. The next year I started to college with an algebra and a tennis racket under my arm (they wouldn't jam into the trunk), and a dozen friends came down to see me off. On Number Eleven that day I met four other boys going to the same school. We are still close chums, though one is on the coast, another's here in New York, and the third is in the Philippines. [Illustration: It seemed to me then as if she must have come from heaven by air-line.] It was the next year that I noticed a girl as she stepped off of Number Eleven and was met by one of the Homeburg girls. I didn't know who she was, but it seemed to me then as if she must have come from heaven by air-line, and I felt so friendly toward the girl who met her that I had to go down to her house to call that very night. The visitor had come to stay--her father was starting a new store in Homeburg. I'll tell you, when a snorty old train, which assays two pecks of cinders per car, hauls the most wonderful girl on earth into your town and dumps her into your arms--so to speak, and bunching up events a little--you're bound to love that train.