So much snow: fields of snow, hills of snow; villages with snow on the roofs, and in the dooryards, looking white and deserted in the moonlight. And tunnels—long, terrible, gasping tunnels; and big towns where the train slowed down with a great clackety-clack of wheels, and there was confusion—shouting, and rumbling baggage trucks, and where probably one had to change and sit in a station, or work one’s way through the iron arms that divided up the seats, so one could stretch out, and really sleep a little, at last. Not long, of course, for the other train would soon come shrieking in, and Aunt Alice or the hero, or Corinne, the soubrette, or somebody, would drag her through the iron divisions, and maybe carry her onto it, and if she didn’t remember that she had gone to bed before, she was apt to say her “Now I lay me” over again, and “God bless Mama and Dorothy, and keep them safe and well, and please, God, let me wake up in Heaven,” which she always added. And then, if there were no more changes that night, almost right away it was morning, with coal-dust, and cinders, and gray outside at first ... with perhaps a streaky sky ... or dull and drowned with rain ... or caught up in a whirl of snow; and the train boy came through and sold her a sandwich for breakfast; or maybe they had reached the next show-town, and she went scurrying down the platform, holding Aunt Alice’s hand and lugging the little telescope bag, to a lunch counter where there might be something warm.... Not really a “pleasure excursion,” but long afterwards she did not regret it—she even found something “rather beautiful” in it. * * * * * They did not really “put up” at hotels. They merely “put in,” at a cheap one, for the day. Aunt Alice would get a room for fifty cents, until theatre time. Then the two soubrettes—good-hearted, even if rather tough, girls—would come to “call,” to share the room, each paying ten or fifteen cents. All stretched out on the bed, the sofa, anywhere, to catch up with their sleep. They only got up to eat—something they brought in, or at a restaurant, a cheap one (oh, worse in that day than now!)—or for a matinée.