Now and then a quiet voice spoke out of the silence.
"Blime! There's a rabbit!"
"There's an English serving-maid!"
"Ain't it all solid-like?"
That solidity was one of Ernie's abiding impressions too—the massive character of this Western Civilization to which he was returning. And it stood, he was convinced, for something real: for it was based on a foundation that only the blind and gross could call materialism.
The big-boned porters trundling tinkling milk-cans along the platforms at a wayside station, the English faces, the square brick buildings, the substantial coin, confirmed the thought.
"Solid!" he echoed in his father's vein. "That's the word. Give me the West. Back there it's all a little bit o gilded gimcrack."
Once the train stopped in an embankment lined with primroses and crowned with woods, a sweet undercurrent of song streaming quietly up to heaven, like the murmur of innumerable fairy-bees.
Ernie removed his cap; and the unuttered words in his heart, as in those of his companions, were, "Let us pray!"
A few weeks later he stood on the platform of Victoria, discharged.