coat be grown. While he was begging me to come into the
station-house and rest, I stood still looking up the long line
of railway by which we had come, feeling as if my life lay at
the other end of it, out of sight and quite beyond reach. Yet
I asked him not to call me "poor" Daisy. I was very tired, and
I suppose my nerves not very steady. Preston said we must wait
at that place for another train; there was a fork in the road
beyond, and this train would not go the right way. It would
not take us to Baytown. So he had me into the station-house.

It wearied me, and so did all that my eyes lighted upon,
strange though it was. The bare room, not clean; the board
partition, with swinging doors, behind which, Preston said,
were the cook and the baker; the untidy waiting girls that
came and went, with scant gowns and coarse shoes, and no
thread of white collar to relieve the dusky throat and head
rising out of the dark gown; and no apron at all. Preston did
what he could. He sent away the girls with their trays of
eatables; he had a table pulled out from the wall and wiped
off; and then he ordered a supper of eggs, and johnny cake,
and all sorts of things. But I could not eat. As soon as
supper was over I went out on the platform to watch the long
lines of railway running off through the forest, and wait for
the coming train. The evening fell while we looked; the train
was late; and at last when it came I could only know it in the
distance by the red spark of its locomotive gleaming like a
firefly.

It was a freight train; there was but one passenger car, and
that was full. We got seats with difficulty, and apart from