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Their Pilgrimage by Charles Dudley Warner
page 43 of 270 (15%)
a pity that we shall never see her again, and that she has nothing
whatever to do with our journey. She also will have her romance; fate
will meet her in the way some day, and set her pure heart wildly beating,
and she will know what those purple distances mean. Happiness, tragedy,
anguish--who can tell what is in store for her? I cannot but feel
profound sadness at meeting her in this casual way and never seeing her
again. Who says that the world is not full of romance and pathos and
regret as we go our daily way in it? You meet her at a railway station;
there is the flutter of a veil, the gleam of a scarlet bird, the lifting
of a pair of eyes--she is gone; she is entering a drawing-room, and stops
a moment and turns away; she is looking from a window as you pass--it is
only a glance out of eternity; she stands for a second upon a rock
looking seaward; she passes you at the church door--is that all? It is
discovered that instantaneous photographs can be taken. They are taken
all the time; some of them are never developed, but I suppose these
impressions are all there on the sensitive plate, and that the plate is
permanently affected by the impressions. The pity of it is that the
world is so full of these undeveloped knowledges of people worth knowing
and friendships worth making.

The comfort of leaving same things to the imagination was impressed upon
our travelers when they left the narrow-gauge railway at the mountain
station, and identified themselves with other tourists by entering a
two-horse wagon to be dragged wearily up the hill through the woods. The
ascent would be more tolerable if any vistas were cut in the forest to
give views by the way; as it was, the monotony of the pull upward was
only relieved by the society of the passengers. There were two bright
little girls off for a holiday with their Western uncle, a big,
good-natured man with a diamond breast-pin, and his voluble son, a lad
about the age of his little cousins, whom he constantly pestered by his
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