The car was quite crowded. There were more people than themselves who were going to the Fair and were obliged to economize. When the children entered, and looked about them in the dim light, they thought at first that all the seats were full. People seemed to be huddled up asleep or sitting up awake in all of them. Everybody had been trying to get to sleep, at least, and the twins found themselves making their whispers even lower than before.

“I think there is a seat empty just behind that very fat lady,” Meg whispered.

It was at the end of the car, and they went to it, and found she was right. They took possession of it quietly, putting their satchel under the seat.

“It seems so still,” said Meg, “I feel as if I was in somebody’s bedroom. The sound of the wheels makes it seem all the quieter. It’s as if we were shut in by the noise.”

“We mustn’t talk,” said Robin, “or we shall waken the people. Can you go to sleep, Meg?”

“I can if I can stop thinking,” she answered, with a joyful sigh. “I’m very tired; but the wheels keep saying, over and over again, ‘We’re going – we’re going – we’re going.’ It’s just as if they were talking. Don’t you hear them?”

“Yes, I do. Do they say that to you, too? But we mustn’t listen,” Robin whispered back. “If we do we shall not go to sleep, and then we shall be too tired to walk about. Let’s put our heads down, and shut our eyes, Meg.”

“Well, let’s,” said Meg.

She curled herself up on the seat, and put her head into the corner.

“If you lean against me, Rob,” she said, “it will be softer. We can take turns.”

They changed position a little two or three times, but they were worn out with the day’s work, and their walk, and the excitement, and the motion of the train seemed like a sort of rocking which lulled them. Gradually their muscles relaxed and they settled down, though, after they had done so, Meg spoke once, drowsily.

“Rob,” she said, “did you see that was our man?”

“Yes,” answered Rob, very sleepily indeed, “and he looked as if he knew us.”

* * * * * * * *

If they had been less young, or if they had been less tired, they might have found themselves awake a good many times during the night. But they were such children, and, now that the great step was taken, were so happy, that the soft, deep sleepiness of youth descended upon and overpowered them. Once or twice during the night they stirred, wakened for a dreamy, blissful moment by some sound of a door shutting, or a conductor passing through. But they were only conscious of a delicious sense of strangeness, of the stillness of the car full of sleepers, of the half-realized delight of feeling themselves carried along through the unknown country, and of the rattle of the wheels, which never ceased saying rhythmically, “We’re going – we’re going – we’re going!”

Ah! what a night of dreams and new, vague sensations, to be remembered always! Ah! that heavenly sense of joy to come, and adventure, and young hopefulness and imagining! Were there many others carried towards the City Beautiful that night who bore with them the same rapture of longing and belief; who saw with such innocent clearness only the fair and splendid thought which had created it, and were so innocently blind to any shadow of sordidness or mere worldly interest touching its white walls? And after the passing of this wonderful night, what a wakening in the morning, at the first rosiness of dawn, when all the other occupants of the car were still asleep, or restlessly trying to be at ease!

It was as if they both wakened at almost the same moment. The first shaft of early sunlight streaming in the window touched Meg’s eyelids, and she slowly opened them. Then something joyous and exultant rushed in upon her heart, and she sat upright. And Robin sat up too, and they looked at each other.

“It’s the Day, Meg!” said Robin. “It’s the Day!” Meg caught her breath.

“And nothing has stopped us,” she said. “And we are getting nearer and nearer. Rob, let us look out of the window.”

For a while they looked out, pressed close together, and full of such ecstasy of delight in the strangeness of everything that at first they did not exchange even their whispers.

It is rather a good thing to see – rather well worth while even for a man or woman – the day waking, and waking the world, as one is borne swiftly through the morning light, and one looks out of a car window. What it was to these two children only those who remember the children who were themselves long ago can realize at all. The country went hurrying past them, making curious sudden revelations and giving half-hints in its haste; prairie and field, farmhouse and wood and village all wore a strange, exciting, vanishing aspect.

“It seems,” Meg said, “as if it was all going somewhere – in a great hurry – as if it couldn’t wait to let us see it.”

“But we are the ones that are going,” said Rob. “Listen to the wheels – and we shall soon be there.”

After a while the people who were asleep began to stir and stretch themselves. Some of them looked cross, and some looked tired. The very fat lady in the seat before them had a coal smut on her nose.

“Robin,” said Meg, after looking at her seriously a moment, “let’s get our towel out of the bag and wet it and wash our faces.”

They had taken the liberty of borrowing a towel from Aunt Matilda. It was Meg who had thought of it, and it had, indeed, been an inspiration. Robin wetted two corners of it, and they made a rigorous if limited toilet. At least they had no smuts on their noses, and after a little touching up with the mutual comb and brush, they looked none the worse for wear. Their plain and substantial garments were not of the order which has any special charm to lose.

“And it’s not our clothes that are going to the Fair,” said Meg, “it’s us!”

And by the time they were in good order, the farms and villages they were flying past had grown nearer together. The platforms at the dépôts were full of people who wore a less provincial look; the houses grew larger and so did the towns; they found themselves flashing past advertisements of all sorts of things, and especially of things connected with the Fair.

“You know how we used to play ‘hunt the thimble,’” said Robin, “and how, when any one came near the place where it was hidden, we said, ‘Warm – warmer – warmer still – hot!’ It’s like that now. We have been getting warmer and warmer every minute, and now we are getting – ”

“We shall be in in a minute,” said a big man at the end of the car, and he stood up and began to take down his things.

“Hot,” said Robin, with an excited little laugh. “Meg, we’re not going – going – going any more. Look out of the window.”

“We are steaming into the big dépôt,” cried Meg. “How big it is! What crowds of people! Robin, we are there!”

Robin bent down to pick up their satchel; the people all rose in their seats and began to move in a mass down the aisle toward the door. Everybody seemed suddenly to become eager and in a hurry, as if they thought the train would begin to move again and carry them away. Some were expecting friends to meet them, some were anxious about finding accommodations. Those who knew each other talked, asked questions over people’s shoulders, and there was a general anxiety about valises, parcels, and umbrellas. Robin and Meg were pressed back into their section by the crowd, against which they were too young to make headway.

“We shall have to wait until the grown-up people have passed by,” Rob said.

But the crowd in the aisle soon lost its compactness, and they were able to get out. The porter, who stood on the platform near the steps, looked at them curiously, and glanced behind them to see who was with them, but he said nothing.

It seemed to the two as if all the world must have poured itself into the big dépôt or be passing through it. People were rushing about; friends were searching for one another, pushing their way through the surging crowd; some were greeting each other with exclamations and hand-shaking, and stopping up the way; there was a Babel of voices, a clamor of shouts within the covered place, and from outside came a roar of sound rising from the city.

For a few moments Robin and Meg were overwhelmed. They did not quite know what to do; everybody pushed past and jostled them. No one was ill-natured, but no one had time to be polite. They were so young and so strange to all such worlds of excitement and rush, involuntarily they clutched each other’s hands after their time-honored fashion, when they were near each other and overpowered. The human vortex caught them up and carried them along, not knowing where they were going.

“We seem so little!” gasped Meg. “There – there are so many people! Rob, Rob, where are we going?”

Robin had lost his breath too. Suddenly the world seemed so huge – so huge! Just for a moment he felt himself turn pale, and he looked at Meg and saw that she was pale too.

“Everybody is going out of the dépôt,” he said.

“Hold on to me tight, Meg. It will be all right. We shall get out.”

And so they did. The crowd surged and swayed and struggled, and before long they saw that it was surging towards the entrance gate, and it took them with it. Just as they thrust through they found themselves pushed against a man, who good-naturedly drew a little back to save Meg from striking against his valise, which was a very substantial one. She looked up to thank him, and gave a little start. It was the man she had called “our man” the night before, when she spoke of him to Robin. And he gave them a sharp but friendly nod.

“Hallo!” he exclaimed, “it’s you two again. You are going to the Fair!”

Robin looked up at his shrewd face with a civil little grin.

“Yes, sir; we are,” he answered.

“Hope you’ll enjoy it,” said the man. “Big thing.” And he was pushed past them and soon lost in the crowd.

X

The crowd in the dépôt surged into the streets, and melted into and became an addition to the world of people there. The pavements were moving masses of human beings, the centres of the streets were pandemoniums of wagons and vans, street cars, hotel omnibuses, and carriages. The brilliant morning sunlight dazzled the children’s eyes; the roar of wheels and the clamor of car bells, of clattering horses’ feet, of cries and shouts and passing voices, mingled in a volume of sound that deafened them. The great tidal wave of human life and work and pleasure almost took them off their feet.

They knew too little of cities to have had beforehand any idea of what the overwhelming rush and roar would be, and what slight straws they would feel themselves upon the current. If they had been quite ordinary children, they might well have been frightened. But they were not ordinary children, little as they were aware of that important factor in their young lives. They were awed for this first moment, but, somehow, they were fascinated as much as they were awed, while they stood for a brief breathing-space looking on. They did not know – no child of their ages can possibly know such things of him or herself – that Nature had made them of the metal out of which she moulds strong things and great ones. As they had not comprehended the restless sense of wrong and misery the careless, unlearning, and ungrowing life in Aunt Matilda’s world filled them with, so they did not understand that, because they had been born creatures who belong to the great moving, working, venturing world, they were not afraid of it, and felt their first young face-to-face encounter with it a thing which thrilled them with an exultant emotion they could not have explained.

“This is not Aunt Matilda’s world,” said Rob. “It – I believe it is ours, Meg. Don’t you?”

Meg was staring with entranced eyes at the passing multitude.

“‘More pilgrims are come to town,’” she said, quoting the “Pilgrim’s Progress” with a far-off look in her intense little black-browed face. “You remember what it said, Rob, ‘Here also all the noise of them that walked in the streets was, More pilgrims are come to town.’ Oh, isn’t it like it!”

It was. And the exaltation and thrill of it got into their young blood and made them feel as if they walked on air, and that every passing human thing meant, somehow, life and strength to them.

Their appetites were sharpened by the morning air, and they consulted as to what their breakfast should be. They had no money to spend at restaurants, and every penny must be weighed and calculated.

“Let’s walk on,” said Meg, “until we see a bakery that looks as if it was kept by poor people. Then we can buy some bread, and eat it with our eggs somewhere.”

“All right,” said Robin.

They marched boldly on. The crowd jostled them, and there was so much noise that they could hardly hear each other speak; but ah! how the sun shone, and how the pennons fluttered and streamed on every side, and how excited and full of living the people’s faces looked! It seemed splendid, only to be alive in such a world on such a morning. The sense of the practical which had suggested that they should go to a small place led them into the side streets. They passed all the big shops without a glance, but at last Meg stooped before a small one.

“There’s a woman in there,” she said; “I just saw her for a minute. She has a nice face. She looked as if she might be good-natured. Let’s go in there, Robin. It’s quite a small place.”

They went in. It was a small place but a clean one, and the woman had a good-natured face. She was a German, and was broad and placid and comfortable. They bought some fresh rolls from her, and as she served them, and was making the change, Meg watched her anxiously. She was thinking that she did look very peaceable, indeed. So, instead of turning away from the counter, she planted herself directly before her and asked her a question.

“If you please,” she said, “we have some hard-boiled eggs to eat with our bread, and we are not going home. If we are very careful, would you mind if we ate our breakfast in here, instead of outside? We won’t let any of the crumbs or shells drop on the floor.”

“You not going home?” said the woman. “You from out town?”

“Yes,” answered Meg.

“You look like you wass goun to der Fair,” said the woman, with a good-tempered smile. “Who wass with you?”

“No one,” said Robin. “We are going alone. But we’re all right.”

“My crayshious!” said the woman. “But you wass young for that. But your ’Merican childrens is queer ones. Yes! You can sit down an’ eat your bregfast. That make no matter to me if you is careful. You can sit down.”

There were two chairs near a little table, where, perhaps, occasional customers ate buns, and they sat down to their rolls and eggs and salt, as to a feast.

“I was hungry,” said Rob, cracking his fourth egg.

“So was I!” said Meg, feeling that her fresh roll was very delicious.

It was a delightful breakfast. The German woman watched them with placid curiosity as they ate it. She had been a peasant in her own country, and had lived in a village among rosy, stout, and bucolic little Peters and Gretchens, who were not given to enterprise, and the American child was a revelation to her. And somehow, also, these two had an attraction all American children had not. They looked so well able to take care of themselves, and yet had such good manners and no air of self-importance at all. They ate their rolls and hard-boiled eggs with all the gusto of very young appetite, but they evidently meant to keep their part of the bargain, and leave her no crumbs and shells to sweep up. The truth was that they were perfectly honorable little souls, and had a sense of justice. They were in the midst of their breakfast, when they were rather startled by hearing her voice from the end of the counter where she had been standing, leaning against the wall, her arms folded.

“You like a cup coffee?” she asked.

They both looked round, uncertain what to say, not knowing whether or not that she meant that she sold coffee. They exchanged rather disturbed glances, and then Robin answered.

“We can’t afford it, thank you, ma’am,” he said, “we’ve got so little money.”

“Never mind,” she astonished them by answering, “that cost me nothing. There some coffee left on the back of the stove from my man’s bregfast. I give you each a cup.” And she actually went into the little back room, and presently brought back two good cups of hot coffee.

“There, you drink that,” she said, setting them down on the little table. “If you children goun to der Fair in that crowd by yourselves, you want something in your stomachs.”

It was so good – it was so unexpected – it seemed such luck! They looked at each other with beaming eyes, and at her with quite disproportionate gratitude. It was much more than two cups of coffee to them.

“Oh, thank you,” they both exclaimed. “We’re so much obliged to you, ma’am!”

Their feast seemed to become quite a royal thing. They never had felt so splendidly fed in their lives. It seemed as if they had never tasted such coffee.

When the meal was finished, they rose refreshed enough to feel ready for anything. They went up to the counter and thanked the German woman again. It was Meg who spoke to her.

“We want to say thank you again,” she said. “We are very much obliged to you for letting us eat our breakfast in here. It was so nice to sit down, and the coffee was so splendid. I dare say we do seem rather young to be by ourselves, but that makes us all the more thankful.”

“That’s all right,” said the woman. “I hope you don’t get lost by der Fair – and have good time!”

And then they went forth on their pilgrimage, into the glorious morning, into the rushing world that seemed so splendid and so gay – into the fairy-land that only themselves and those like them could see.

“Isn’t it nice when some one’s kind to you, Rob?” Meg exclaimed joyfully, when they got into the sunshine. “Doesn’t it make you feel happy, somehow, not because they’ve done something, but just because they’ve been kind?”

“Yes, it does,” answered Rob, stepping out bravely. “And I’ll tell you what I believe – I believe there are a lot of kind people in the world.”

“So do I,” said Meg. “I believe they’re in it even when we don’t see them.”

And all the more, with springing steps and brave young faces, they walked on their way to fairy-land.

They had talked it all over – how they would enter their City Beautiful. It would be no light thing to them, their entrance into it. They were innocently epicurean about it, and wanted to see it at the very first in all its loveliness. They knew that there were gates of entrance here and there, through which thousands poured each day; but Meg had a fancy of her own, founded, of course, upon that other progress of the Pilgrim’s.

“Robin,” she said, “oh, we must go in by the water, just like those other pilgrims who came to town. You know that part at the last where it says, ‘And so many went over the water and were let in at the golden gates to-day.’ Let us go over the water and be let in at the golden gates. But the water we shall go over won’t be dark and bitter; it will be blue and splendid, and the sun will be shining everywhere. Ah, Rob, how can it be true that we are here!”

They knew all about the great arch of entrance and stately peristyle. They had read in the newspapers all about its height and the height of the statues adorning it; they knew how many columns formed the peristyle, but it was not height or breadth or depth or width they remembered. The picture which remained with them and haunted them like a fair dream was of a white and splendid archway, crowned with one of the great stories of the world in marble – the triumph of the man in whom the god was so strong that his dreams, the working of his mind, his strength, his courage, his suffering, wrested from the silence of the Unknown a new and splendid world. It was this great white arch they always thought of, with this precious marble story crowning it, the blue, blue water spread before the stately columns at its side, and the City Beautiful within the courts it guarded. And it was to this they were going when they found their way to the boat which would take them to it.

It was such a heavenly day of June! The water was so amethystine, the sky such a vault of rapture! What did it matter to them that they were jostled and crowded, and counted for nothing among those about them? What did it matter that there were often near them common faces, speaking of nothing but common, stupid pleasure or common sharpness and greed? What did it matter that scarcely any one saw what they saw, or, seeing it, realized its splendid, hopeful meaning? Little recked they of anything but the entrancement of blue sky and water, and the City Beautiful they were drawing near to.

When first out of the blueness there rose the fair shadow of the whiteness, they sprang from their seats, and, hand in hand, made their way to the side, and there stood watching, as silent as if they did not dare to speak lest it should melt away; and from a fair white spirit it grew to a real thing – more white, more fair, more stately, and more an enchanted thing than even they had believed or hoped.

And the crowd surged about them, and women exclaimed and men talked, and there was a rushing to and fro, and the ringing of a bell, and movement and action and excitement were on every side. But somehow these two children stood hand in hand and only looked.

And their dream had come true, though it had been a child’s dream of an enchanted thing.