merely one of the modern civilizers, the railroads, had never existed.
There simply wouldn't be any America, as we know it now."

"How can you say that?"

"Because it is so. For nearly two centuries we stood still, because
there were no means of locomotion--which is another word for progress
and civilization. But in less than fifty years after the first railroad
was built we had become a great nation."

She was silenced, if not wholly convinced; and a few minutes later the
train drew into the Forty-second Street Station. When the parting time
came, Ford dutifully gathered her belongings, said good-by, and put her
on a north-bound subway; all this without remembering that he did not
know her name. The recollection came, however, when the subway train
shot away into the tunnel.

"Of all the blockheads!" he growled, apostrophizing his own unreadiness.
"But I'll find her again. She said she'd send her brother to the hotel
with the dinner money, and when I get hold of him it will go hard with
me if I don't manage some way to get an introduction."

This was what was in his mind when he sought the down-town hotel whose
name he had written on his card for her; it was his latest waking
thought when he went to sleep that night, and his earliest when he awoke
the following morning.

But when he went to the clerk's desk, after a leisurely breakfast, to
get his mail, he found that the sure thread of identification had broken
in his fingers. There was a square envelope among the other letters in