They abandoned themselves upon the green stuff, whatever it was, and, with their lean hands clasped outside their knees, sat and stared, silent and hopeless, at the eastern sky, at the heart of the terrible furnace, into which in those days the world seemed cast to be burnt up, while the child which the younger woman had brought with her feebly wailed unheeded at her side.  On one side of the women were the shameless houses out of which they might have crept, and which somehow suggested riotous maritime dissipation; on the other side were those houses in which had once dwelt rich and famous folk, but which were now dropping down to the boarding-house scale through various unhomelike occupations to final dishonor and despair.  Down nearer the water, and not far from the castle that was once a playhouse and is now the depot of emigration, stood certain express wagons, and about these lounged a few hard-looking men.  Beyond laughed and danced the fresh blue water of the bay, dotted with sails and smokestacks.

—­Howells:  Their Wedding Journey.

The successive images of the preceding selection are clear enough, but they are bound together by a common purpose, which is the creation of a single impression.  Often, however, a description may present, not a single impression, but a series of such impressions, to which a unity is given by the fact that they are all connected with one event, or occur at the same time, or in the same place.  Such a series of impressions is illustrated in the following:—­

It is a phenomenon whose commonness alone prevents it from being most impressive, that departure of the night-express.  The two hundred miles it is to travel stretch before it, traced by those slender clews, to lose which is ruin, and about which hang so many dangers.  The drawbridges that gape upon the way, the trains that stand smoking and steaming on the track, the rail that has borne the wear so long that it must soon snap under it, the deep cut where the overhanging mass of rocks trembles to its fall, the obstruction that a pitiless malice may have placed in your path, you think of these after the journey is done, but they seldom haunt your fancy while it lasts.  The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances is so perfect that it begets a sense of irresponsibility, almost of security; and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleeping car and feel yourself hurled forward through the obscurity, you are almost thankful that you can do nothing, for it is upon this condition only that you can endure it; and some such condition as this, I suppose, accounts for many heroic acts in the world.  To the fantastic mood which possesses you equally, sleeping or waking, the stoppages of the train have a weird character, and Worcester, Springfield, New Haven, and Stamford are rather points in dreamland than well-known towns of New England.  As the train stops you drowse if you have been waking, and wake if you have been