as it would ha’ ben to hire a passage any other way?” and innocently endured the smile that her query called forth on half a dozen faces about her.  The gentleman, without a smile, courteously lowered his newspaper to reply that “he always thought it better to avail one’s self of established conveniences rather than to waste time in independent contrivances;” and the old lady sat back,—­as far back as she dared, considering her momentary apprehension of Bartley,—­quite happily complacent in the confirmation of her own wisdom.

There was a trig, not to say prim, spinster, without a vestige of comeliness in her face, save the comeliness of a clear, clean, energetic expression,—­such as a new broom or a bright tea-kettle might have, suggesting capacity for house thrift and hearth comfort,—­who wore a gray straw bonnet, clean and neat as if it had not lasted for six years at least, which its fashion evidenced, and which, having a bright green tuft of artificial grass stuck arbitrarily upon its brim by way of modern adornment, put Leslie mischievously in mind of a roof so old that blades had sprouted in the eaves.  She was glad afterwards that she had not spoken her mischief.

What made life beautiful to all these people?  These farmers, who put on at daybreak their coarse homespun, for long hours of rough labor?  These homely, home-bred women, who knew nothing of graceful fashions; who had always too much to do to think of elegance in doing?  Perhaps that was just it; they had always something to do, something outside of themselves,—­in their honest, earnest lives there was little to tempt them to a frivolous self-engrossment.  Leslie touched close upon the very help and solution she wanted, as she thought these thoughts.

Opposite to her there sat a poor man, to whom there had happened a great misfortune.  One eye was lost, and the cheek was drawn and marked by some great scar of wound or burn.  One half his face was a fearful blot.  How did people bear such things as these,—­to go through the world knowing that it could never be pleasant to any human being to look upon them? that an instinct of pity and courtesy would even turn every casual glance away?  There was a strange, sorrowful pleading in the one expressive side of the man’s countenance, and a singularly untoward incident presently called it forth, and made it almost ludicrously pitiful.  A bustling fellow entered at a way-station, his arms full of a great frame that he carried.  As he blundered along the passage, looking for a seat, a jolt of the car, in starting, pitched him suddenly into the vacant place beside this man; and the open expanse of the large looking-glass—­for it was that which the frame held—­was fairly smitten, like an insult of fate, into the very face of the unfortunate.

“Beg pardon,” the new comer said, in an off-hand way, as he settled himself, holding the glass full before the other while he righted it; and then, for the first time, giving a quick glance toward him.  The astonishment, the intuitive repulsion, the consciousness of what he had done, betokened by the instant look of the one man, and the helpless, mute “How could you?” that seemed spoken in the strange, uprolled, one-sided expression of the other,—­these involuntarily-met regards made a brief concurrence at once sad and irresistibly funny, as so many things in this strange life are.