to prevent any one from availing himself of that providential near-
sightedness, and beatifying himself upon those lips,--nothing to prevent
it but that young fellow, whom one might not, of course, care to provoke.

Among the people who now rush forward and heap themselves into the two
horse-cars and one omnibus, placed before the depot by a wise forethought
for the public comfort to accommodate the train-load of two hundred
passengers, I always note a type that is both pleasing and interesting to
me. It is a lady just passing middle life; from her kindly eyes the
envious crow, whose footprints are just traceable at their corners, has
not yet drunk the brightness, but she looks just a thought sadly, if very
serenely, from them. I know nothing in the world of her; I may have seen
her twice or a hundred times, but I must always be making bits of romances
about her. That is she in faultless gray, with the neat leather bag in her
lap, and a bouquet of the first autumnal blooms perched in her shapely
hands which are prettily yet substantially gloved in some sort of
gauntlets. She can be easy and dignified, my dear middle-aged heroine,
even in one of our horse-cars, where people are for the most part packed
like cattle in a pen. She shows no trace of dust or fatigue from the
thirty or forty miles which I choose to fancy she has ridden from the
handsome elm-shaded New England town of five or ten thousand people, where
I choose to think she lives. From a vague horticultural association with
those gauntlets, as well as from the autumnal blooms, I take it she loves
flowers, and gardens a good deal with her own hands, and keeps house-
plants in the winter, and of course a canary. Her dress, neither rich nor
vulgar, makes me believe her fortunes modest and not recent; her gentle
face has just so much intellectual character as it is good to see in a
woman's face; I suspect that she reads pretty regularly the new poems and
histories, and I know that she is the life and soul of the local book-
club. Is she married, or widowed, or one of the superfluous forty