“All right. You’ll find drinking water up there at the end of the car. Mind you don’t try to leave the car or get off when we stop, or you’ll be left.” And with this final warning, he passed on to his other duties.
But Tommy had no desire whatever to move from his seat. The train flew on past miners’ cabins and scattered hamlets, till at last the mines were left behind, and the mountains began to fall back from the river which they had crowded so closely. The great white inn at Clifton Forge, with its stately court and playing fountains, gave him a glimpse of fairyland. Soon he was looking out miles and miles across a wide valley, dotted like a great chess-board with fields of corn and barley, and with the white farm-houses here and there peeping through their sheltering groves of oaks and chestnuts. It seemed a peaceful, happy, contented country, and Tommy’s eyes dwelt upon it wistfully. Wide, level fields were something new to his experience, and he longed to have a good run across them. The mountains fell farther and farther away, until at last not one remained to mar the line where the sky stooped to the horizon.
At Charlottesville Tommy caught his first glimpse of what a great city may be. Now Charlottesville is not by any means a great city, but the crowds which thronged the long platform and eddied away into the streets drew from him a gasp of astonishment. And then the houses, built one against another in long rows that seemed to have no end! He had not thought that people could live so close together.
The train hurried on over historic ground, if Tommy had only known it,—Gordonsville, Culpeper, Manassas,—where thirty-five years before every house and fence and clump of trees had been contested stubbornly and bloodily by blue and gray. Another historic place they touched, Alexandria, where the church George Washington attended and the very pew he sat in still remain. Then along the bank of the Potomac, whose two miles or more of width made the boy gasp again, across a long bridge, and in a moment Tommy found himself looking out at a tall, massive shaft of stone that resembled nothing so much as a gigantic chimney, and beyond it great buildings, and still other great buildings, as far as the eye could reach.
“Washington!” yelled the brakeman, slamming back the door. “All out fo’ Washington!”
Tommy grasped his box convulsively,—it was the only part of his baggage that had been left to his care, for his trunk was ahead in the baggage-car,—and looked anxiously around for his friend the conductor. That blue-coated official had not forgotten him, and in a moment Tommy saw him coming.
“Now you stay right where you are,” he said, “till I get all the other passengers off, and then I’ll come back after you.”
“All right, sir,” answered Tommy, breathing a sigh of relief. “I’ll be right here, sir.”
The crowds at Charlottesville were nothing to those that hurried past him now, and he sat watching them, fascinated, until he heard the conductor calling from the door.
“Step lively, sonny,” he called, and as they jumped down together to the platform, he saw that Tommy was carrying the unopened box in which his dinner was. “Why, look here,” he said, “didn’t you eat anything?”