quite full, and again empty of all but themselves. In the course of their
observations they formed many cordial friendships and bitter enmities
upon the ground of personal appearance, or particulars of dress, with
people whom they saw for half a minute upon an average; and they took
such a keen interest in every one, that it would be hard to say whether
they were more concerned in an old gentleman with vigorously upright
iron-gray hair, who sat fronting them, and reading all the evening
papers, or a young man who hurled himself through the door, bought a
ticket with terrific precipitation, burst out again, and then ran down a
departing train before it got out of the station: they loved the old
gentleman for a certain stubborn benevolence of expression, and if they
had been friends of the young man and his family for generations and felt
bound if any harm befell him to go and break the news gently to his
parents, their nerves could not have been more intimately wrought upon by
his hazardous behavior. Still, as they had their tickets for New York,
and he was going out on a merely local train,--to Brookline, I believe,
they could not, even in their anxiety, repress a feeling of contempt for
his unambitious destination.

They were already as completely cut off from local associations and
sympathies as if they were a thousand miles and many months away from
Boston. They enjoyed the lonely flaring of the gas-jets as a gust of wind
drew through the station; they shared the gloom and isolation of a man
who took a seat in the darkest corner of the room, and sat there with
folded arms, the genius of absence. In the patronizing spirit of
travellers in a foreign country they noted and approved the vases of
cut-flowers in the booth of the lady who checked packages, and the pots
of ivy in her windows. "These poor Bostonians," they said; "have some
love of the beautiful in their rugged natures."