"Is this Lumberville?" asked Bert, who had noticed that the trees were not quite so thick now.
"Lumberville—Lumber-ville!" called the porter, smiling back at the
Bobbsey twins as he stood near their pile of baggage. "All out for
Lumberville."
"That's us!" cried Bert, with a laugh.
Slowly the train came to a stop. Bert and Nan, standing near the window from which they had been looking all the morning, saw a small, rough building flash into view. Near it were flatcars piled high with lumber and logs. But there was no sign of a city or a town.
"Come on!" called Daddy Bobbsey to his family.
The porter carried out their baggage, and the children jumped down the car steps. They found themselves on the platform of a small station—a station that looked more like a shanty in the woods than a place for railroad trains to stop.
"Good-bye! An' good luck to yo' all!" called the smiling porter, as he climbed up the car steps, carrying the rubber-covered stool he had put down for the passengers to alight on.
Then the train puffed away and the Bobbsey twins, with their father and mother, and with their baggage around them, stood on the platform of the station which, as Bert could see, was marked "Lumberville."
"But where's the place? Where's the town? Where's the men cutting down trees and all that?" Bert asked. He was beginning to feel disappointed.
"Oh, this is only where the trains stop," his father said. "Lumberville isn't a city, or even a town. It's just a settlement for the lumber-men. Our timber tract is about seven miles from here."