"You can't have a whole seat to yourself, and nobody wants to sit near that ugly brute," said the surly conductor.
Edna glanced down the aisle, and saw two young gentlemen stretched at full length on separate seats, eyeing her curiously.
Observing that the small seat next to the door was partially filled with the luggage of the parties who sat in front of it, she rose and called to the dog, saying to the conductor as she did so: "I will take that half of a seat yonder, where I shall be in nobody's way."
Here Mr, Wood came forward, thrust her ticket into her fingers, and shook her hand warmly, saying hurriedly: "Hold on to your ticket, and don't put your head out of the window. I told the conductor he must look after you and your box when you left the cars; said he would. Good-by, Edna; take care of yourself, and may God bless you, child."
The locomotive whistled, the train moved slowly on, and the miller hastened back to his cart.
As the engine got fully under way, and dashed around a curve, the small, straggling village disappeared, trees and hills seemed to the orphan to fly past the window; and when she leaned out and looked back, only the mist-mantled rocks of Lookout, and the dim, purplish outline of the Sequatchie heights were familiar.
In the shadow of that solitary sentinel peak her life had been passed; she had gathered chestnuts and chincapins among its wooded clefts, and clambered over its gray boulders as fearlessly as the young llamas of the Parime; and now, as it rapidly receded and finally vanished, she felt as if the last link that bound her to the past had suddenly snapped; the last friendly face which had daily looked down on her for twelve years was shut out forever, and she and Grip were indeed alone, in a great, struggling world of selfishness and sin. The sun shone dazzlingly over wide fields of grain, whose green billows swelled and surged under the freshening breeze; golden butterflies fluttered over the pink and blue morning- glories that festooned the rail-fences; a brakeman whistled merrily on the platform, and children inside the car prattled and played, while at one end a slender little girlish figure, in homespun dress and pink calico bonnet, crouched in a corner of the seat, staring back in the direction of hooded Lookout, feeling that each instant bore her farther from the dear graves of her dead; and oppressed with an intolerable sense of desolation and utter isolation in the midst of hundreds of her own race, who were too entirely absorbed in their individual speculations, fears and aims, to spare even a glance at that solitary young mariner, who saw the last headland fade from view, and found herself, with no pilot but ambition, drifting rapidly out on the great, unknown, treacherous Sea of Life, strewn with mournful human wrecks, whom the charts and buoys of six thousand years of navigation could not guide to a haven of usefulness and peace. Interminable seemed the dreary day, which finally drew to a close, and Edna, who was weary of her cramped position, laid her aching head on the window-sill, and watched the red light of day die in the west, where a young moon hung her silvery crescent among the dusky tree-tops, and the stars flashed out thick and fast. Far away among strangers, uncared for and unnoticed, come what might, she felt that God's changeless stars smiled down as lovingly upon her face as on her grandfather's grave; and that the cosmopolitan language of nature knew neither the modifications of time and space, the distinctions of social caste, nor the limitations of national dialects.