"What's yours, sir?"
"I was going to tell you. Life, to me, is like this train, a lot of sections and a lot of couplings. When you're through with a car, side-track it and—yank out the coupling. Like all philosophies, this one has its flaw. Once in a while your soul looks out of the window and sees some long-forgotten, side-tracked car beckoning to be coupled on again. If you try to go back and pick it up, you're done. Never look back, boy; never look back. Live ahead even if you're only living a compensation."
"What's a compensation?" asked Lewis.
"A compensation," said Leighton thoughtfully, "is a thing that doesn't quite compensate."
Above the rattle of the train sounded the deep bellow of a steamer's throttle. Lewis turned to the window. Night had fallen.
"Oh, look, sir!" he cried. "We're almost there!"
Leighton joined him. Before them were spangled, in a great crescent, a hundred thousand lights. Along the water-front the lights clustered thickly. They climbed a cliff in long zigzags. At the top they clustered again. Out on the bay they swayed from halyards, their reflections glimmering back from the rippling water like so many agitated moons.
"Right you are—Bahia," said Leighton. "We're almost there, and it's no fishing-hamlet, either."
CHAPTER XIV
The next morning, as they were sitting, after their coffee and rolls, at a little iron table on the esplanade of the Sul Americano, Leighton said: "It takes a man five years to learn how to travel in a hurry and fifteen more to learn how not to hurry. You may consider that you've been a traveler for twenty years." He stretched and yawned. "Let's take a walk, slowly."