It was a terrible day. We were traveling through the dreariest part of our great and glorious republic,

which on that particular morning was neither great nor glorious, but looked drab enough to suggest

some circle that had apparently been overlooked when Dante gave us his descriptions of the

Nether Regents. A few minutes before, the train had come to a halt.

I don't know why.

Nobody knew why, and nobody cared.

The slush and rain would be just as bad a mile hence or a hundred miles hence,

the fields with their desolate burden of

brown decaying cornstalks would present just as eloquent a picture of despair one

mile farther along the road as a hundred or maybe a thousand. Some 200 yards away from the track there stood a

house, a very plain and ordinary house. It needed paint but so did all the farm

houses we had seen during the past 24 hours. It also needed repairs. It had apparently been built by a carpenter who must have hated

beauty as a deacon is supposed to hate sin and with very much the same results. Out of that

farmhouse came two small children, a boy and a girl. They may have been 12 and then again they may have been 14. It's hard to tell.

They wore hideous woolen caps and mufflers, red woolen caps and mufflers and red woolen gloves, knit coarsely and carelessly.

So carelessly and coarsely that even at a distance, one could notice how little love

had been worked into those garments.

I dare say that they were practical, and that they kept out the cold.

But at no greater cost and with very little extra trouble, they could just as well have been made

pleasant to the eye. The little boy and the little girl came

slithering through the slush and then they stopped in the road to gaze at our

train. That train was a thing of mystery to them. It was their only link with a world

...