There had been very little left of the pig; but the conductor and the rest seemed much disposed to say unkind things about him, and about his owner, and about all the other pigs they could think of.

“This train’ll never get in on time,” said Ford to the conductor, a little later.  “How’ll I get to the city?”

The railway man was not in the best of humors; and he answered, a little groutily, “Well, young man, I don’t suppose the city could get along without you over night.  The junction with the main road is only two miles ahead, and if you’re a good walker you may catch a train there.”

Some of the other passengers, none of whom were much more than “badly shaken up,” or down, had made the same discovery; and in a few minutes more there was a long, straggling procession of uncomfortable people, marching by the side of the railway-track, in the hot sun.  They were nearly all of them making unkind remarks about pigs, and the faculty they had of not getting out of the way.

The conductor was right, however; and nearly all of them managed to walk the two miles to the junction in time to go in on the other train.

Ford Foster was among the first to arrive, and he was likely to reach home in season, in spite of the pig and his outrageous conduct.

As for his danger, he had hardly thought of that; and he again and again declared to himself that he would not have missed so important an adventure for any thing he could think of.  It almost sounded once or twice as if he took to himself no small amount of personal credit, not to say glory, for having been in so remarkable an accident, and come out of it so well.

Ford’s return, when he should make it, was to take him to a great, pompous, stylish, crowded “up-town boarding-house,” in one of the fashionable streets of the great city.  There was no wonder at all that wise people should wish to get out of such a place in such hot weather.  Still it was the sort of home Ford Foster had been acquainted with all his life; and it was partly owing to that, that he had become so prematurely “knowing.”

He knew too much, in fact, and was only too well aware of it.  He had filled his head with an unlimited stock of boarding-house information, as well as with a firm persuasion that there was little more to be had,—­unless, indeed, it might be scraps of such outside knowledge as he had now been picking up over on Long Island.

In one of the large “parlor-chambers” of the boarding-house, at about eight o’clock that evening, a middle-aged gentleman and lady, with a fair, sweet-faced girl of about nineteen, were sitting near an open window, very much as if they were waiting for somebody.  Such a kind, motherly lady!  She was one of those whom no one can help liking, after seeing her smile once, or hearing her speak.

Ford Foster himself could not have put in words what he thought about his mother.  And yet he had no difficulty whatever in expressing his respect for his father, or his unbounded admiration for his pretty sister Annie.