The train jarred and started slowly; the gloved exquisite, waiting hackmen, baggage-masters, coffee-counter, and station-walls slid back; engine-house and prison towers, and labyrinths of tracks slipped by; lumber and shipping took their place, with clear spaces between, where sea and sky shone through.  The speed of the train increased with a sickening sway; old wharves shot past, with the green water sucking at their piers; the city shifted by and out of sight.

  “We’ve lived and loved together,”

played Tommy in a little plaintive wail,

  “We’ve lived and loved—­”

“Confound the boy!” Harmon pushed up his hat with a jerk, and looked out of the window.  The night was coming on.  A dull sunset lay low on the water, burning like a bale-fire through the snaky trail of smoke that went writhing past the car windows.  Against lonely signal-houses and little deserted beaches the water was plashing drearily, and playing monotonous bases to Tommy’s wail:—­

  “Through many changing years,
  Many changing years.”

It was a nuisance, this music in the cars.  Why didn’t somebody stop it?  What did the child mean by playing that?  They had left the city far behind now.  He wondered how far.  He pushed up the window fiercely, venting the passion of the music on the first thing that came in his way, and thrust his head out to look back.  Through the undulating smoke, out in the pale glimmer from the sky, he could see a low, red tongue of land, covered with the twinkle of lighted homes.  Somewhere there, in among the quivering warmth, was one—­

What was that boy about now?  Not “Home, sweet Home?” But that was what Tommy was about.

They were lighting the lamps now in the car.  Harmon looked at the conductor’s face, as the sickly yellow flare struck on it, with a curious sensation.  He wondered if he had a wife and five children; if he ever thought of running away from them; what he would think of a man who did; what most people would think; what she would think.  She!—­ah, she had it all to find out yet.

  “There’s no place like home,”

said Tommy’s little fiddle,

  “O, no place like home.”

Now this fiddle of Tommy’s may have had a crack or so in it, and I cannot assert that Tommy never struck a false note; but the man in the corner was not fastidious as a musical critic; the sickly light was flickering through the car, the quiver on the red flats was quite out of sight, the train was shrieking away into the west,—­the baleful, lonely west,—­which was dying fast now out there upon the sea, and it is a fact that his hat went slowly down over his face again, and that his face went slowly down upon his arm.