A more unhappy, frightened little fellow could hardly have been found.
The train paused at many stations; men and women got on or got out of the cars, very common-looking people, surely, he concluded.

The day ran by to afternoon.

The train had stopped at a station for lunch, but John, although hungry, was afraid of being left and kept the seat which he presumed to be his own property until a stout man took half of it.

A little later, a lean old woman said, "Move up, sonny," and sat down.
When she asked his name and where he lived, he replied in the coldly civil manner with which he had heard his mother repress the good-natured advances of her wandering countrymen.

When again the seat was free, he fell to thinking of the unknown home, Grey Pine, which he had heard his mother talk of to English friends as "our ancestral home," and of the great forests, the mines and the iron-works.