with brilliant light, and within them a vista of cut glass and
snow-white table linen, smiling negroes and millionaires with napkins
at their chins whirling past in the driving snowstorm.

I can tell you the people of Mariposa are proud of the trains, even
if they don't stop! The joy of being on the main line lifts the
Mariposa people above the level of their neighbours in such places as
Tecumseh and Nichols Corners into the cosmopolitan atmosphere of
through traffic and the larger life. Of course, they have their own
train, too--the Mariposa Local, made up right there in the station
yard, and running south to the city a hundred miles away. That, of
course, is a real train, with a box stove on end in the passenger
car, fed with cordwood upside down, and with seventeen flat cars of
pine lumber set between the passenger car and the locomotive so as to
give the train its full impact when shunting.

Outside of Mariposa there are farms that begin well but get thinner
and meaner as you go on, and end sooner or later in bush and swamp
and the rock of the north country. And beyond that again, as the
background of it all, though it's far away, you are somehow aware of
the great pine woods of the lumber country reaching endlessly into
the north.

Not that the little town is always gay or always bright in the
sunshine. There never was such a place for changing its character
with the season. Dark enough and dull it seems of a winter night, the
wooden sidewalks creaking with the frost, and the lights burning dim
behind the shop windows. In olden times the lights were coal oil
lamps; now, of course, they are, or are supposed to be, electricity,
brought from the power house on the lower Ossawippi nineteen miles