Maple Street instead of tumbling down the bluff like other streets, to be chopped off short at the wharves, seems to lift itself there with a sense of power beneath, becomes a victory and a spirit, and so floats out over the brown Muscadine. The bridge was always to Hennion more like his father than the canal or the C. V. Railroad. The railroad was a financial cripple now, absorbed in a system. The great day of the canal was long past. The elder Hennion had seemed a soul for daring and success, and that was the bridge. It stood to Hennion for a memorial, and for the symbol of his father's life and his own hope in the working world. He liked to stand on it, to feel it beneath and around him, knowing what each steel girder meant, and what in figures was the strength of its grip and pull. There was no emotional human nature in it, no need of compromise. Steel was steel, and stone stone, and not a bolt or strand of wire had any prejudice or private folly. In a certain way he seemed to find his father there, and to be able to go over with him their old vivid talks. The Muscadine reflected up at him, out of its brown turbulence, shattered fragments of the moon and stars. A quavering voice spoke in his ear: “Got a light?” Besides himself and the inebriate, who held up by the nearest girder, there was only one other person on the bridge, a small, thin figure, creeping from the distance toward them in the moonlight, a half-grown child, who leaned her shoulders to one side to balance a basket on the other. “Pretty full, Jimmy Shays,” Hennion said, giving him a match. “You'd float all right if you fell into the river.” “Tha'sh right, tha'sh right! I drinks to pervent accerdents, myself.” He lit the match, seemed to gather the idea that he had succeeded with the pipe, and sucked at it imaginatively; then started suddenly for the basket girl. “Hi!” The child stopped and looked at him. “I gets one end. Tha'sh right.” She accepted the offer with matter-of-fact gravity, and they moved away over the bridge unsteadily. The glamour of the moon was around them. Hennion heard Shays lift his voice into husky resemblance of a song. A queer world, with its futilities like Shays, its sad little creeping creatures like the basket girl! Down the river some distance was the P. and N. Railroad bridge. The west-bound train shot out upon it, a sudden yell, a pursuing rumble, a moving line of lit windows. Whatever one did, taking pride in it purely as a work, as victory and solution, it was always done at last for the sake of men and women. The west-bound passenger train was the foremost of effectual things. It ran as accurately to its aims in the dark as in the light, with a rhythm of smooth machinery, over spider-web bridges. Compared with the train, the people aboard it were ineffectual. Most of them had--but mixed ideas of their purposes there. But if no passengers had been aboard, the westbound train would have been a silly affair.