"Italians."
I told him the story of a storm at sea with the exaggeration to which one is too prone when addressing simple souls. I rather harrowed him with an account of cook's enamel ware and kitchen things rolling about and jangling when every one was saying his prayers.
Presently I remarked irrelevantly, "My goodness! What a noise the frogs make here!"
"That's no noise," said he; "I'm going to sleep."
After a while his bedfellow came in and he, before turning in, got down on his knees in the narrow passage between the beds and prayed—I should say, a whole half-hour, talking half to himself, half-aloud. Whilst he was doing so my bedfellow came in, a tall, heavy, tired Pole, who looked neither to right nor left, but just clambered over me and lay down with his face to the wall and slept and snored.
It rained heavily all night, and next morning it still poured. After a disreputably bad breakfast I sat on a chair at the door of the establishment and watched the thresh of the rain on two great pools beside a road of coal-dust, looked out at the lank grass, the tomato-can dump, the sodden refuse of the boarding-house, and away to the square red chimney of the brick factory belching forth black smoke.
"Say, stranger," said mine host, "I'm going to wade into that cave and hand out potatoes; will you take them from me?" This was the first time I had been called stranger in America, and it sounded pleasant in my ears.
About eleven o'clock in the morning the rain ceased, and I went on to the next point on the railway. The track climbed higher and higher, and I learned that on the morrow I should reach the top of the Alleghany Mountains—Snow Shoe Creek.
It was a fine walk to Orviston under the heavily clouded sky. The mountain sides were all a-leak with springs and trickling streams and cascades. There was an accompanying music of the racing Beech Creek on the one hand, and of the gushing rivulets on the other; but this would be swallowed up and lost every now and then in the uproar of the oncoming and passing freight train of coal; the appalling, hammering, affrighting freight train passing within two feet of me, taking my breath away with the thought of its power. How pleasant it was, though, to listen to the rebirth of the music of the waters coming to the ear in the wind of the last trucks as they passed.