This announcement was met, I am sorry to say, with more murmurs at the detention than thanks for our providential escape from imminent peril. "How unfortunate!" cried one. "And in this lonely, disagreeable place too!" added another. A third wondered where we were, when one of the company familiar with the route volunteered the information that we were not many miles from Toronto.
Now, from the moment I sat down by my new acquaintance, I had divined--by that sort of mysterious sympathy, impossible to define, but which will be understood by all converts to the Catholic faith--that she was, like myself, of this class; and she had formed the same conjecture in relation to me; which was, perhaps, the cause of our having formed a sudden intimacy not quite in keeping with the native reserve, not to say shyness, of both. Our first and simultaneous act, upon the occurrence of the incident recorded--in fortifying ourselves with the blessed sign of benediction and protection so precious to all Catholics--had confirmed the mutual conjecture, and established a strong bond of sympathy between us.
As we left the cars together, I observed that she still scanned the surrounding localities with an earnestness that did not seem warranted by any claims they possessed to notice; for a more tame and uninteresting region can scarcely be imagined than that in which we so reluctantly lingered.
"What wonderful changes forty years will make in the face of a new country!" she at length exclaimed. "I passed this way, going and returning, in 1827, at an age when the deepest impressions are received, and upon an errand so peculiar in its nature as to make those impressions indelible. I have always carried the picture of the route, slowly traversed at that time, in my memory; but the transformation is so complete that I look in vain for one familiar feature."
After walking for some time in silence, she resumed: "It is strange how vividly the most minute details of that journey and the incidents connected with it return to me, now that we are so singularly detained in the vicinity of the scenes I then sought, though there is nothing in the aspect of the country to bring them back!"
By this time we had loitered into a shady nook, at no great distance from the disabled car; and its coolness inviting us to remain after we had seated ourselves upon a rock overgrown with moss, I begged that she would while away the time of our detention by giving me a history of those incidents.