"I thought you knew," he said, surprised. "I'm on the Raritan, an oil-tank. Standard Oil, you know. I quite thought you knew."
"I had intended to ask you," I said, "but it is a delicate subject. One cannot very well ferret for details of a stranger's business."
"That's the genteel view, I know," he said, smiling. "There's something to be said for it, too."
"You will come in and finish your story?" I ventured.
"Well, I did think of looking in some time...."
"After dinner to-night?"
"Much obliged. It passes the time."
We went out and climbed into the Paterson express. We are rather proud of this train in a way, for it is the only one of the day which confines itself to stations when contemplating a stop. I narrated to Mr. Carville an incident of the preceding winter when a commuter of Hawthorne, on our line, stepping out one snowy night, found himself clinging to the trestles of the bridge over the Pasayack River, and the train vanishing into the darkness. Mr. Carville laughed at this, and remarked jocosely that he was "safer at sea." We discussed for some time the comparative merits of English and American railroads, Mr. Carville expressing the fairly shrewd opinion that "conditions so different made any comparison out of the question."
"After all," he remarked, "leaving out London, which has more people in it than Canada and Venezuela put together, what is England? From an American point of view, I mean. Simply Maryland!"
I appreciated this. Often during my sojourn in America, I had pored over maps and vainly endeavoured to form some conception of so gigantic a territory. I had failed. I had come to the conclusion that minds nurtured in the insular atmosphere were forever incapable of visualizing a continent. In my fugitive letters to friends at home I had been reduced to the astronomer's facile illustrations. "Just as," I had written in despair—"just as a railway train, travelling at a mile a minute, takes nearly 180 years to reach the sun, so we, travelling in a tourist car at rather less than a mile a minute, took an apparently interminable period to reach the sun of California!" It was a poor jest, but excusable one whose clothes, ears, mouth, eyes and nose were full of cinder-dust, excusable in a disdainful Britisher so far from home. To Englishmen, who had never seen a grade-crossing, a desert, or a mountain, and for whom a short night-journey on smooth rock-ballasted lines suffices to take them from one end of their country to the other, my figure was vague enough, no doubt. Some day, when I go back, I shall try to explain.