That man is exasperating. It is next to impossible to be a Christian where he is, and very hard to be a decent man. They give penny-royal tea to bring out the measles. He is a decoction of human penny-royal, and brings to the surface all the ill humors there are in you. Sometimes your Argumentative Man is a clergyman, sometimes a layman, but you wish the train was a ship bound for Tarshish, and the Man's name was Jonah, and a convenient whale alongside, though you are sorry for the whale—but then we are all selfish, if we are not whales! But the Man is asleep, and the knitting-work put away, and the cards have had their last shuffle, and grandma is dreaming of home, and ever so many more are gazing up at the car lights in a stupid way, or looking out through the blank windows at—nothing. The man with the black bottle is low-spirited, so is the bottle, and he has settled his head down between his shoulders—shut up like a telescope. It is all dull and stupid enough.
There are two women seated together, plain women, say forty-five or fifty years old. They have good, open, friendly faces. Plainly dressed, modest, and silent save when they conversed with each other, you had hardly noticed them. Perhaps there was the least touch of rural life about them. They would make capital country aunts to visit in mid-summer, or mid-winter for that matter. If they were mothers at all, they were good ones. So much you see, if you know how.
Well, it was wearing on towards twelve o'clock—the reader is requested to believe that this is no fancy sketch—when through the dull silence there rose a voice as clear and mellow and flexible as a girl's, of the quality that goes to the heart like the greeting of a true friend. It belonged to one of those women. She sat with her white face, a little seamed with time and trouble, turned neither to the right nor the left, seemingly unconscious that she had a listener. They were the old songs she sang—the most of them,—songs of the conference and the camp—such as the sweet young Methodists, and Baptists withal, with their hair combed back, used to sing in the years that are gone.
First it was
"Rock of Ages! cleft for me,"
and then,
"Our days are gliding swiftly on."
The clear tones grew rounder and sweeter. Those that were awake listened; those that were asleep awoke all around her. Some left their seats and came nearer, but she never noticed them. A brakeman, who had not heard a "psalm tune" since his mother led him to church by the hand when he was a little boy, and who was rattling the stove as if he were fighting a chained maniac, laid down the poker and stood still.
Then it was:
"A charge to keep I have,"