Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its
passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the
engine; and as it was for this we had been waiting, we were
summoned by the cry of "All aboard!" and went on again upon our
way. The whole line, it appeared, was topsy-turvy; an accident at
midnight having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear. We paid
for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that day. Fruit we
could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at
some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale;
but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at every
opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow
my way to the counter.

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day. There
was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river
valleys among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a
sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon. It had an inland
sweetness and variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods,
rivers, and the delved earth. These, though in so far a country,
were airs from home. I stood on the platform by the hour; and as I
saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway
and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in
the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the
plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light
dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface,
I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who
had come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a
river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the
Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of
the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the