"I wish I hadn't mentioned food," went on Mr. Tolman humorously. "It was an unfortunate suggestion." "I'm hungry, too," piped Doris. "There, you see the epidemic you have started, Henry," called Mrs. Tolman accusingly. "Here is Doris vowing she is in the last throes of starvation." Nobody noticed that in the meanwhile the mother had reached down and lifted into her lap the small suitcase hidden in the bottom of the car. She opened the cover and began to remove its contents. At length, when a remark her husband made to her went unheeded, he sensed her preoccupation and came around to the side of the car where she was sitting. Immediately he gave a cry of surprise. "My word!" he exclaimed. "Steve, come here and see what your mother has." Stephen looked. There sat Mrs. Tolman, unpacking with quiet enjoyment sandwiches, eggs, cake, cookies, and olives. A shout of pleasure rose from the famished travelers. "So it was not your jewels, after all, Mater!" cried Stephen. "No, and after the way you have slandered me and my little suitcase, none of you deserve a thing to eat," his mother replied. "However, I am going to be magnanimous if only to shame you. Now climb in and we will have our lunch. You can fix the tire afterward." The men were only too willing to obey. As with brightened faces they took their seats in the car, Stephen smiled with affection at his mother. "Well, Mater, Watt was not the only person who lived to see himself appreciated; and I don't believe people were any more grateful to him for his steam engine than we are to you right now for this luncheon. You are the best mother I ever had." CHAPTER IV THE STORY OF THE FIRST RAILROAD The new tire went on with unexpected ease and early afternoon saw the Tolmans once more bowling along the highway toward Northampton. The valley of the Connecticut was decked with harvest products as for an autumnal pageant. Stacks of corn dotted the fields and pyramids of golden pumpkins and scarlet apples made gay the verandas of the old homesteads or brightened the doorways of the great red barns flanking them. "All that is needed to transform the scene into a giant Hallowe'en festival is to have a witch whisk by on a broomstick, or a ghost bob up from behind a tombstone," declared Mrs. Tolman. "Just think! If we had come by train we would have missed all this beauty." "I see plainly that you do not appreciate the railroads, my dear," returned her husband mischievously. "This is the second time to-day that you have slandered them. You sound like the early American traveler who asserted that it was ridiculous to build railroads which did very uncomfortably in two days what could be done delightfully by coach in eight or ten." "Why, I should have thought people who had never heard of motor-cars would have welcomed the quicker transportation the railroads offered," was Mrs. Tolman's reply.