“A few moments later both trains had departed, and the only sounds to be heard were the ticking of the busy instrument and the monotonous hum of the wires.  I looked at the clock.  It was 9.09—­just nine minutes since the regular express had steamed into the station.  It seemed impossible to me that so much could have happened in so short a time.  Had each minute been a week it could not have seemed longer.”

George paused as though his story was done.  “And Julia?” I asked, laying my hand lightly on his knee.  Without replying, he drew out of his pocket an old frayed pocket-book, took out of it a slip of faded newspaper, and silently handed it to me.  The words printed on it were very few; simply these:  “Died March 8th, 1874, of rapid consumption, Julia Waine, aged twenty years and five months.”

As I raised my head and looked at him, he said as he looked out of the low window, “The cold she took that fearful night killed her.”

* * * * *

A Memorable Dinner.

As I often have wondered whether a Christmas dinner ever was so fearfully and wonderfully constructed, and under such novel circumstances, as the one to which I sat down on Christmas Day, 1879, I have decided to relate—­in the truthful, unvarnished style that one always looks for in the old railway man—­the incidents in which I was fortunate enough to participate on that occasion.

That year, I was Assistant-Superintendent of the St. ——­ R.R., and was returning on Christmas eve from the annual inspection of the line, in company with the General Manager of the road, in the private car “St. Paul,” when one of the worst blizzards I ever experienced, even in that prairie country, burst upon us, and in less than an hour, had buried the track so deeply that further progress was impossible.

It was about midnight when the engine, fully five miles distant from a human habitation, and two hundred miles from our home, sulkily admitted the superior power of nature’s forces and hove to.

Fortunately, for humanity’s sake, there were on our special—­which consisted of the engine, the baggage car, and our private car—­only five souls:  Charles Fielding, the manager; myself, William Thurlow; Fred Swan, the conductor; Joe Robbins, the driver; and the hero of this history, Ovide Tetreault, the French-Canadian fireman.

It was about two o’clock in the morning when we finally gave up all hope of getting along any farther, at least for some hours, and Fielding and I lay down in our berths with the hope that the storm would abate before daybreak, so that a snow-plough might reach us and clear the line, in time to enable us to reach our homes for the Christmas dinner.

But as I lay awake and listened to the shrieks of the storm, the presentiment grew upon me that the chances of our spending the best part of Christmas Day in our contracted abode were depressingly promising.  These thoughts, coupled with the knowledge that our car was but poorly provisioned, and that we were without a cook—­having let that functionary stop off for Christmas Day at the station beyond which we were stranded—­were in nowise conducive to my falling asleep more readily than was my wont.