In person, Erastus Snaffle was not especially prepossessing. His face would have been more attractive had the first edition of his chin been larger and the succeeding ones smaller, while the days when he could still boast of a waist were so far in the irrevocable past that the imagination refused so long a flight as would be required to reach it. His eyes were small and heavy-lidded, but in them smouldered a dull gleam of cunning that at times kindled into a pointed flame. His dress was in keeping with his person, and his manner quite as vulgar as either. He was sitting to-night in one corner of the sofa, his corpulent person heaped up in an unshapely mass, talking with a fluency that now and then died away entirely, while he paused to speculate what sort of a game his hostess might be playing with Mr. Greenfield. "The fact is," Mrs. Sampson was saying, as Snaffle recalled his attention from one of these fits of abstraction, "that I don't know what I shall do this summer; and I don't like to believe that summer is so near that I must decide soon." "You were at Ashmont last year, weren't you?" Snaffle asked. "Why don't you go there again." Mrs. Sampson shot him a quick glance which Snaffle understood at once to mean that he was to second her in something she was attempting. He did not yet get his clew clearly enough to understand just how, but the look put him on the alert, as the hostess answered,-- "Oh, it is all spoiled. The railroad has been put through and all the summer visitors are giving it up. I'm sure I don't know what will become of all the poverty-stricken widows that made their living out of taking boarders. That railroad has been an expensive job for Ashmont in every way." Greenfield smiled, his big, genial smile which had so much warmth in it. "That isn't usually the way people look at the effect of a railroad on a town." This time the look which Mrs. Sampson gave Snaffle told him so plainly what she wanted him to do that he spoke at once, her almost imperceptible nod showing him that he was on the right track. "Oh, a railroad is always the ruin of a small town," he said, "unless it is its terminus. It sucks all the life out of the villages along the way. You go along any of the lines in Massachusetts, and you will find that while the towns have been helped by the road, the small villages have been knocked into a cocked hat. All the young people have left them; all the folks in the neighborhood go to some city to do their trading, and the stuffing is knocked out of things generally." Mrs. Sampson looked at Snaffle with a thoroughly gratified expression. "I don't know much about the business part of the question, of course," she said, "but I do know that a railroad takes all the young men out of a village. A woman I boarded with at Ashmont last year wrote to me the other day in the greatest distress because her only son had left her. She said it was all the railroad, and her letter was really pathetic."