The time approached for the train to arrive from Hagerstown, and we went to the station.  I was struck, while waiting there, with what seemed to me a great want of care for the safety of the people standing round.  Just after my companion and myself had stepped off the track, I noticed a car coming quietly along at a walk, as one may say, without engine, without visible conductor, without any person heralding its approach, so silently, so insidiously, that I could not help thinking how very near it came to flattening out me and my match-box worse than the Ravel pantomimist and his snuff-box were flattened out in the play.  The train was late,—­fifteen minutes, half an hour late,—­and I began to get nervous, lest something had happened.  While I was looking for it, out started a freight-train, as if on purpose to meet the cars I was expecting, for a grand smash-up.  I shivered at the thought, and asked an employe of the road, with whom I had formed an acquaintance a few minutes old, why there should not be a collision of the expected train with this which was just going out.  He smiled an official smile, and answered that they arranged to prevent that, or words to that effect.

Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment when a collision did occur, just out of the city, where I feared it, by which at least eleven persons were killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed and crippled!

To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing worse.  The expected train came in so quietly that I was almost startled to see it on the track.  Let us walk calmly through the cars, and look around us.

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain; there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many cities.

“How are you, Boy?”

“How are you, Dad?”

* * * * *

Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime-Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard,—­nay, which had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on his brother’s neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the women.  But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a drop or a film of moisture.

These are times in which we cannot live solely for selfish joys or griefs.  I had not let fall the hand I held, when a sad, calm voice addressed me by name.  I fear that at the moment I was too much absorbed in my own feelings; for certainly at any other time I should have yielded myself without stint to the sympathy which this meeting might well call forth.

“You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom I brought to see you once in Boston?”

“I do remember him well.”