The guiltily dreaded examination of baggage at Island Pond took place at nine o’clock, without costing them a cent of duty or a pang of conscience.  At that charming station the trunks are piled higgledy-piggledy into a room beside the track, where a few inspectors with stifling lamps of smoky kerosene await the passengers.  There are no porters to arrange the baggage, and each lady and gentleman digs out his box, and opens it before the lordly inspector, who stirs up its contents with an unpleasant hand and passes it.  He makes you feel that you are once more in the land of official insolence, and that, whatever you are collectively, you are nothing personally.  Isabel, who had sent her husband upon this business with quaking meekness of heart, experienced the bold indignation of virtue at his account of the way people were made their own baggage-smashers, and would not be amused when he painted the vile terrors of each husband as he tremblingly unlocked his wife’s store of contraband.

The morning light showed them the broad elmy meadows of western-looking Maine; and the Grand Trunk brought them, of course, an hour behind time into Portland.  All breakfastless they hurried aboard the Boston train on the Eastern Road, and all along that line (which is built to show how uninteresting the earth can be when she is ‘ennuyee’ of both sea and land), Basil’s life became a struggle to construct a meal from the fragmentary opportunities of twenty different stations where they stopped five minutes for refreshments.  At one place he achieved two cups of shameless chickory, at another three sardines, at a third a dessert of elderly bananas.

     “Home again, home again, from a foreign shore!”

they softly sang as the successive courses of this feast were disposed of.

The drouth and heat, which they had briefly escaped during their sojourn in Canada, brooded sovereign upon the tiresome landscape.  The red granite rocks were as if red-hot; the banks of the deep cuts were like ash heaps; over the fields danced the sultry atmosphere; they fancied that they almost heard the grasshoppers sing above the rattle of the train.  When they reached Boston at last, they were dustier than most of us would like to be a hundred years hence.  The whole city was equally dusty; and they found the trees in the square before their own door gray with dust.  The bit of Virginia-creeper planted under the window hung shriveled upon its trellis.

But Isabel’s aunt met them with a refreshing shower of tears and kisses in the hall, throwing a solid arm about each of them.  “O you dears!” the good soul cried, “you don’t know how anxious I’ve been about you; so many accidents happening all the time.  I’ve never read the ’Evening Transcript’ till the next morning, for fear I should find your names among the killed and wounded.”

“O aunty, you’re too good, always!” whimpered Isabel; and neither of the women took note of Basil, who said, “Yes, it ’s probably the only thing that preserved our lives.”