Remembering this warning, Betty sat up very straight at first, and held the basket handles in such a tight grasp that her fingers ached.  But after the conductor had looked at her pass and smiled kindly into the appealing little face under the white sunbonnet, she felt more at ease and began to look shyly about her.

Somebody’s grandmother was in the seat in front of her, such a fat, comfortable-looking old lady, that Betty felt sure she could not be a Wolf in disguise, and watched her with neighbourly interest.  She fell to wondering about her, where she lived and where she was going, and what she had in her many bags, boxes, shawl-straps, and satchels.

Things were not half so strange as she had expected them to be.  The corn-fields and tobacco-fields and apple-orchards whizzing past the windows were exactly like the ones she had left at home.  More than once a meadow full of daisies, gleaming on her sight like drifts of summer snow, made her think of the lower pasture at home, where she had waded through them the day before, waist-deep.

Even the people who came on the cars at the stations along the way looked like the people she saw at church every week, and Betty soon began to feel very much at home.  After awhile the train stopped at a junction where she had to wait several hours to make connection with the Louisville train.  But even that did not turn out to be a bad experience, as she had feared, for the old lady waited too, and she was as anxious to find a friend as Betty was.  So it was not long until the two were talking together as sociably as two old neighbours, and they ate their lunch together with so many exchanges of confidences that they were both surprised when Betty’s train came puffing along.  They had not imagined the time could fly so fast.

At parting they kissed each other as if they had always been friends, and Betty climbed into the car with a warm glow in her heart at having found such unexpected pleasantness along the way.

“It was silly of me to have been so frightened,” she thought.  “The world isn’t a jungle, after all, and we are just as apt to meet the grandmothers as the wolves when we go travelling.”

She was mixing Kaa’s experience with Red Riding-hood’s in her thought, but it made no difference.  The conclusion she reached was a comfortable one.  So she leaned back in her seat to enjoy the rest of the journey without any foolish fears.

Little by little the motion of the train had its effect.  The white sunbonnet nodded nearer and nearer toward the cushioned back of the seat; the brown eyes drooped drowsily, and in a few minutes Betty was sound asleep.  That was the last she knew of the trip that she had settled herself to enjoy, for when she awoke the brakeman was calling “Louisville!” at the top of his voice, and people were beginning to reach up to the racks overhead for their bundles.