With a sudden shrill scream the engine slipped off on a side-track, and the cars glided into the great, grim city-station, looking all the grimmer for its twinkling lights.  The masses of people who were waiting and the masses of people who had come surged toward each other like two great waves, and mingled in a moment.  I caught sight of my poor little friend, Boy, following his father, struggling along in the crowd, carrying two heavy carpet-bags, a strapped bundle, and two umbrellas, and being sharply told to “Keep up close there.”

“Ha!” said I, savagely, to myself, “doing porters’ work is not one of the things which ‘boys’ are ‘not allowed.’”

Half an Hour in a Railway Station.

It was one of those bleak and rainy days which mark the coming of spring on New England sea-shores.  The rain felt and looked as if it might at any minute become hail or snow; the air pricked like needles when it blew against flesh.  Yet the huge railway station was as full of people as ever.  One could see no difference between this dreariest of days and the sunniest, so far as the crowd was concerned, except that fewer of the people wore fine clothes; perhaps, also, that their faces looked a little more sombre and weary than usual.

There is no place in the world where human nature shows to such sad disadvantage as in waiting-rooms at railway stations, especially in the “Ladies’ Room.”  In the “Gentlemen’s Room” there is less of that ghastly, apathetic silence which seems only explainable as an interval between two terrible catastrophes.  Shall we go so far as to confess that even the unsightly spittoons, and the uncleanly and loquacious fellowship resulting from their common use, seem here, for the moment, redeemed from a little of their abominableness,—­simply because almost any action is better than utter inaction, and any thing which makes the joyless, taciturn American speak to his fellow whom he does not know, is for the time being a blessing.  But in the “Ladies’ Room” there is not even a community of interest in a single bad habit, to break the monotone of weary stillness.  Who has not felt the very soul writhe within her as she has first crossed the threshold of one of these dismal antechambers of journey?  Carpetless, dingy, dusty; two or three low sarcophagi of greenish-gray iron in open spaces, surrounded by blue-lipped women, in different angles and attitudes of awkwardness, trying to keep the soles of their feet in a perpendicular position, to be warmed at what they have been led to believe is a steam-heating apparatus; a few more women, equally listless and weary-looking, standing in equally difficult and awkward positions before a counter, holding pie in one hand, and tea in a cup and saucer in the other, taking alternate mouthfuls of each, and spilling both; the rest wedged bolt upright against the wall in narrow partitioned seats, which only need a length of perforated foot-board in front to make them fit to be patented as the best