The Gilded Age


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rest, without trouble, without anxiety. There was a church, a graveyard,  
a mill, a village; and now, without pause or fear, the train had mounted  
a trestle-work high in air and was creeping along the top of it while a  
swift torrent foamed a hundred feet below.  
What would the morning bring? Even while he was flying to her, her gentle  
spirit might have gone on another flight, whither he could not follow  
her. He was full of foreboding. He fell at length into a restless doze.  
There was a noise in his ears as of a rushing torrent when a stream is  
swollen by a freshet in the spring. It was like the breaking up of life;  
he was struggling in the consciousness of coming death: when Ruth stood  
by his side, clothed in white, with a face like that of an angel,  
radiant, smiling, pointing to the sky, and saying, "Come." He awoke with  
a cry--the train was roaring through a bridge, and it shot out into  
daylight.  
When morning came the train was industriously toiling along through the  
fat lands of Lancaster, with its broad farms of corn and wheat, its mean  
houses of stone, its vast barns and granaries, built as if, for storing  
the riches of Heliogabalus. Then came the smiling fields of Chester,  
with their English green, and soon the county of Philadelphia itself, and  
the increasing signs of the approach to a great city. Long trains of  
coal cars, laden and unladen, stood upon sidings; the tracks of other  
roads were crossed; the smoke of other locomotives was seen on parallel  
lines; factories multiplied; streets appeared; the noise of a busy city  
began to fill the air;--and with a slower and slower clank on the  
673  


Page
671 672 673 674 675

Quick Jump
1 170 341 511 681