The engine panted, and the train sped on. She never met her
fellow-traveler again, but these things Leslie Goldthwaite had learned
from her,--these things she laid by silently in her heart. And the woman
in the gray bonnet never knew the half that she had done.

After taking one through wildernesses of beauty, after whirling one past
nooks where one could gladly linger whole summers, it is strange at what
commonplace and graceless termini these railroads contrive to land one.
Lovely Wells River, where the road makes its sharp angle, and runs back
again until it strikes out eastward through the valley of the
Ammonoosuc; where the waters leap to each other, and the hills bend
round in majestic greeting; where our young party cried out, in an
ignorance at once blessed and pathetic, "Oh, if Littleton should only be
like this, or if we could stop here!"--yet where one cannot stop,
because here there is no regular stage connection, and nothing else to
be found, very probably, that travelers might want, save the outdoor
glory,--Wells River and Woodsville were left behind, lying in the
evening stillness of June,--in the grand and beautiful disregard of
things greater than the world is rushing by to seek,--and for an hour
more they threaded through fair valley sweeps and reaches, past solitary
hillside clearings and detached farms and the most primitive of mountain
hamlets, where the limit and sparseness of neighborhood drew forth from
a gentleman sitting behind them--come, doubtless, from some suburban
home, where numberless household wants kept horse and wagon perpetually
on the way for city or village--the suggestive query, "I wonder what
they do here when they're out of saleratus?"

They brought them up, as against a dead wall of dreariness and
disappointment, at the Littleton station. It had been managed as it