a vague land of snow and forests, log huts, plains, Red Indians, runaway negroes and men with bowie knives. New York had given this fantastic idea a rough joggle, the south-bound express tumbled it all to pieces. Forests and mountains and plains would have been familiar to her imagination, but the south-bound express was producing for her inspection quite different things from these. 84 84 New Jersey with its populous towns, for instance, towns she never could have imagined or dreamed of, filled with people whose existence she could not picture. What gave her a cold grue was the suddenly grasped fact that all this great mechanism of life, cities, towns, roaring railways, agricultural lands, manufacturing districts filled with English speaking people—that all this was alien, knew nothing of Ireland or England, except as it might know of Japan or a dream of the past. The people in the train were talking English—were English to all intents and purposes, and yet, as far as England and Ireland were concerned, she knew them to be dead. It had been freezing in New York, a great rainstorm was blowing across the world as they crossed the Delaware; it passed, sweeping away east under the arch of a vast rainbow, even the rainbow seemed alien and different to Irish rainbows—it was too big. Then came Philadelphia, where some of the dead folk left the train and others got in. One had an Irish voice and accent. He was a big man with a hard, pushful face and a great under jaw. Phyl knew him at once for what he was, and that he had died to Ireland long years ago. Then came Wilmington and Baltimore, and then, long after sunset in the dark, a warmer air that entered the train like a viewless passenger, nerve soothing and mind lulling—the first breath of the South. Next morning, looking from the windows of the 85 car, she saw the South. Vast spaces of low-lying land broken by river and bayou, flooded by the light of the new risen sun and touched by a vague mist from the sea, soft as a haze of summer, warm with light and everywhere hinting at the blue deep sky beyond. 85 Youth, morning, and the spirit of the sea all lay in that luminous haze, that warm light filled with the laziness of June; and, for
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