After about two hours’ driving, there came a scream as if all the panthers in Coos County were let loose to yell, and directly we stopped at a little place where a red flag was hung out.  I asked the Doctor if they’d got the small-pox here, too; but before he could answer, the thunder running along the ground deafened me, and in a minute he had put me inside the cars and was off.

I was determined I wouldn’t appear green before so many folks, though I’d never seen the cars before; so I took my seat, and paid my fare to Old Salem, and looked about me.  Pretty soon a woman came bustling in from somewhere, and took the seat beside me.  There she fidgeted round so that I thought I should have flown.

“Miss,” says she, at length, “will you close your window?  I never travel with a window open; my health’s delicate.”

I tried to shut it, but it wouldn’t go up or down, till a gentleman put out his cane and touched it, and down it slid, like Signor Blitz.  It did seem as if everything about the cars went by miracle.  I thanked him, but I found afterward it would have been more polite not to have spoken.  After that woman had done everything she could think of to plague and annoy the whole neighborhood, she got out at Ipswich, and somebody met her that looked just like our sheriff; and I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear that she’d gone to jail.  When she got out, somebody else got in, and took the same seat.

“Miss,” says she, “will you have the goodness to open your window? this air is stifling.”

And she did everything that the other woman didn’t do.  When she found I wouldn’t talk, she turned to the young gentleman and lady that sat opposite, and that looked as if there was a great deal too much company in the cars, and found they wouldn’t talk either, and at last she caught the conductor and made him talk.

AH this while we were swooping over the country in the most terrific manner.  I thought how frightened mother and Lurindy’d be, if they should see me.  It was no use trying to count the cattle or watch the fences, and the birch-trees danced rigadoons enough to make one dizzy, and we dashed through everybody’s back-yard, and ran so close up to the kitchens that we could have seen what they had for dinner, if we had stayed long enough; and finally I made up my mind that the engine had run away with the driver, and John Talbot would never have me to tend him; and I began to wonder, as I saw the sparks and cinders and great clouds of steam and smoke, if those tornadoes that smash round so out West in the newspapers weren’t just passenger-trains, like us, off the track,—­when all at once it grew as dark as midnight.

“Now,” says I to myself, “it’s certain.  They’ve run the thing into the ground.  However, we can’t go long now.”

And just as I was thinking about Korah and his troop, I remembered what the Doctor had told me about Salem Tunnel, and it began to grow lighter, and we began to go slower, and I picked up my wits and looked about me again.  I had only time to notice that the young gentleman and lady looked very much relieved, and to shake my shawl from the clutch of the woman beside me, when we stopped at Salem, safe and sound.