foreboding. That morning they all got up so early that they had time to
waste over breakfast before taking the 7.30 train for Boston; and they
naturally wasted so much of it that they reached the station only in
season for the 8.00. But there is a difference between reaching the
station and quietly taking the cars, especially if one of your company has
been left at home, hoping to cut across and take the cars at a station
which they reach some minutes later, and you, the head of the party, are
obliged, at a loss of breath and personal comfort and dignity, to run down
to that station and see that the belated member has arrived there, and
then hurry back to your own, and embody the rest, with their accompanying
hand-bags and wraps and sun-umbrellas, into some compact shape for removal
into the cars, during the very scant minute that the train stops at
Charlesbridge. Then when you are all aboard, and the tardy member has been
duly taken up at the next station, and you would be glad to spend the time
in looking about on the familiar variety of life which every car presents
in every train on every road in this vast American world, you are
oppressed and distracted by the cares which must attend the pleasure-
seeker, and which the more thickly beset him the more deeply he plunges
into enjoyment.

I can learn very little from the note-book of the friend whose adventures
I am relating in regard to the scenery of Somerville, and the region
generally through which the railroad passes between Charlesbridge and
Boston; but so much knowledge of it may be safely assumed on the part of
the reader as to relieve me of the grave responsibility of describing it.
Still, I may say that it is not unpicturesque, and that I have a pleasure,
which I hope the reader shares, in anything like salt meadows and all
spaces subject to the tide, whether flooded by it or left bare with their
saturated grasses by its going down. I think, also, there is something
fine in the many-roofed, many-chimneyed highlands of Chelsea (if it is