"Oh, don't ask me to!" said Mrs. March. "The children have had a good drink of milk. We can get along till morning. I would rather go hungry than take out the things with all those people looking on. We can go to bed early: that will be a comfort."
Mistaken Mrs. March! They sat on the steps of the cars for half an hour to watch the sunset. The brakeman had found out that Mr. March was so careful and Nelly and Rob were such good children that he let them sit there as often as they liked. Nelly loved dearly to sit between her father's knees on the upper step and look down at the ground as it seemed to fly away so swiftly under the wheels. Sometimes they went so fast that the ground did not look like ground at all. It looked like a smooth, striped sheet of brown and green paper being drawn swiftly under the car wheels. It seemed to Rob and Nelly as if they must be going out over the edge of the world. All they could see was sky and ground.
"This is the way it looks when you are out in the middle of the ocean, Nell," said her father; "just the great round sky over your head, and the great flat sea underneath: only the sea is never still as the ground is; that is the only difference."
"Still!" cried Rob. "You don't call this ground under us still, do you? It's going as fast as lightning all the time."
"No, Rob! it is we who are going; the ground is still," said his mother; "but it does look just as if the ground were flying one way and we the other. It makes me almost dizzy to look down."
Pretty soon the moon came up in the east. It was almost full, and, as it came up slowly in sight, it looked like a great circle of fire. Rob and Nelly both cried out, when they first saw it:—
"Oh, mamma! oh, papa! see that fire!"
In a very few minutes it was up in full sight, and then they saw what it was.
"Dear me! only the moon, after all," said Rob; "I hoped it was a big fire."