Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/34

26 thrown the railway bridge, too light for it, many thought, but the man laughed at the idea as he looked upon the great supports which stemmed the full flow of the tide.

"So for weeks their uneventful lives went on, nothing more exciting happening in the day than the passing of the great train—tearing by like some screaming soul rushing from damnation; a black snake in the daytime, one of fire by night. To the man and his wife it seemed the one link that bound them to civilization—which spoke to them of the great world that they might else well forget. Through the windows they got many a lightning glance of that society they had left. Here was the young bride alone in a carriage with her husband, speeding on her honeymoon and regarding the world with a smile; here the weary city man reading in a corner his everlasting papers; there the merry schoolboy waving his hat and shouting his unheard jokes from the window; there the hopeless woman mentally checking her household affairs. All were there. In each numbered carriage, every one in his place—first, second, third, the division of the classes according to the purse.