It was my first journey by rail, and the novelty of it filled me with wonder and delight. The train by which I travelled was a fast one, and after my first feeling of fright at the rapidity of the motion had merged into one of intense pleasure and exhilaration of mind, I could afford to look back on my recent coach experience with a sort of pitying superiority, as on a something that was altogether rococo and out of date. Already the rush of new ideas into my mind was so powerful that the old landmarks of my life seemed in danger of being swept clean away. Already it seemed days instead of only a brief hour or two since I had bidden Mrs. Whitehead farewell, and had taken my last look at Park Hill Seminary. The red-faced guard was as good as his word; he and I became famous friends before I reached the end of my journey. At every station at which we stopped he came to the window to see how I was getting on, and whether I was in want of anything, and was altogether so kind to me that I was quite sorry to part from him when the train reached Tydsbury, and left me, a minute later, standing, a solitary waif, on the little platform. The one solitary fly of which the station could boast was laid under contribution. My little box was tossed on to its roof; I myself was shut up inside; the word was given, "To Dupley Walls;" the station was left behind, and away we went, jolting and rumbling along the quiet country lanes, and under overarching trees, all aglow just now with autumn's swift-fading beauty. The afternoon was closing in, and the wind was rising, sweeping up with melancholy soughs from the dim wooded hollows where it had lain asleep till the sun went down; garnering up the fallen leaves like a cunning miser, wherever it could find a hiding-place for them, and then dying suddenly down, and seeming to hold its breath as if listening for the footsteps of the coming winter. In the western sky hung a huge tumbled wrack of molten cloud like the ruins of some vast temple of the gods of eld. Chasmed buttresses, battlements overthrown; on the horizon a press of giants, shoulder against shoulder, climbing slowly to the rescue; in mid-sky a praying woman; farther afield a huge head, and a severed arm the fingers of which were clenched in menace: all these things I saw, and a score others, as the clouds changed from minute to minute in form and brightness, while the stars began to glow out like clusters of silver lilies in the eastern sky. We kept jolting on for so long a time through the twilight lanes, and the evening darkened so rapidly, that I began to grow frightened. It was like being lifted out of a dungeon, when the old fly drew up with a jerk, and a shout of "House there!" and when I looked out and saw that we were close to the lodge entrance of some park. Presently a woman, with a child in her arms, came out of the lodge and proceeded to open the gate for us. Said the driver--"How's Tootlums to-night?"