The Daily News reporter, in a well-creased, light gray suit and tan shoes, and with eye-glasses scientifically balanced on his aquiline nose, was making pointed inquiries into the private plans of the travelers. The Daily News reporters in Mount Mark always wear well-creased, light gray suits and tan shoes, and always have eye-glasses scientifically balanced on aquiline noses.  The uninitiated can not understand how it is managed, but there lies the fact.  Perhaps The News includes these details in its requirements of applicants.  Possibly it furnishes the gray suits and the tan shoes, and even the eye-glasses.  Of course, the reporters can practise balancing them scientifically,—­but how does it happen that they always have aquiline noses?  At any rate, that is the Mount Mark type.  It never varies.

The young woman going to Burlington to spend the week-end was surrounded with about fifteen other young women who had come to “see her off.”  She had relatives in Burlington and went there very often, and she used to say she was glad she didn’t have to exchange Christmas presents with all the “friends” who witnessed her arrivals and departures at the station.  Mount Mark is a very respectable town, be it understood, and girls do not go to the station without an excuse!

The Adams Express wagon was drawn close to the track, and the agent was rushing about with a breathless energy which seemed all out of proportion to his accomplishments.  The telegraph operator was gazing earnestly out of his open window, and his hands were busily moving papers from one pigeon-hole to another, and back again.  Old Harvey Reel, who drove the hotel bus, was discussing politics with the man who kept the restaurant, and the baggage master, superior and supremely dirty, was checking baggage with his almost unendurably lordly air.

This was one of the four daily rejuvenations that gladdened the heart of Mount Mark.

A man in a black business suit stood alone on the platform, his hands in his pockets, his eyes wandering from one to another of the strange faces about him.  His plain white ready-made tie proclaimed his calling.

“It’s the new Methodist preacher,” volunteered the baggage master, crossing the platform, ostensibly on business bound, but really to see “who all” was there.  “I know him.  He’s not a bad sort.”

“They say he’s got five kids, and most of ’em girls,” responded the Adams Express man.  “I’ve ordered me a dress suit to pay my respects in when they get here.  I want to be on hand early to pick me out a girl.”

“Yah,” mocked the telegraph operator, bobbing his head through the window, “you need to.  They tell me every girl in Mount Mark has turned you down a’ready.”

But the Methodist minister, gazing away down the track where a thin curl of smoke announced the coming of Number Nine, and Prudence,—­heard nothing of this conversation.  He was not a handsome man.  His hair was gray at the temples, his face was earnest, only saved from severity by the little clusters of lines at his eyes and mouth which proclaimed that he laughed often, and with relish.