"Yes, well, it must have gone on to Albany."

"But it went away on that track," says Crene.

"Couldn't have gone on that track. Of course they wouldn't
have carried it away over there just to make it go wrong."

For me, I am easily persuaded and dissuaded. If he had told
me that it must have gone in such a direction, that it was a
moral and mental impossibility should have gone in any other,
and have it times enough, with a certain confidence and
contempt of any other contingency, I should gradually have
lost faith in my own eyes, and said, "Well, I suppose it did."
But Crene is not to be asserted into yielding one inch, and
insists that the trunk went to Vermont and not to New York,
and is thoroughly unmanageable. The baggage-master, in anguish
of soul, trots out his subordinates, one after another,--

"Is this the man that wheeled the trunk away? Is this?
Is this?"

The brawny-armed fellows hang back, and scowl, and muffle words
in a very suspicious manner, and protest they won't be got into
a scrape. But Crene has no scrape for them. She cannot swear
to their identity. She had eyes only for the trunk.

"Well," says Baggage-man, at his wits' end, "you let me take
your check, and I'll send the trunk on by express, when it comes.

I pity him, and relax my clutch.