Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock (the false prince TXT) 📕

passing through, you remember it surely as the great swamp just this side of the bridge over the Ossawippi? There is the bridge itself, and the long roar of the train as it rushes sounding over the trestle work that rises above the marsh. Hear the clatter as we pass the semaphores and switch lights! We must be close in now!

What? it feels nervous and strange to be coming here again after all these years? It must indeed. No, don’t bother to look at the reflection of your face in the windowpane shadowed by the night outside. Nobody could tell you now after all these years. Your face has changed in these long years of money-getting in the city. Perhaps if you had come back now and again, just at odd times, it wouldn’t have been so.

There⁠—you hear it?⁠—the long whistle of the locomotive, one, two, three! You feel the sharp slackening of the train as it swings round the curve of the last embankment that brings it to the Mariposa station. See, too, as we round the curve, the row of the flashing lights, the bright windows of the depot.

How vivid and plain it all is. Just as it used to be thirty years ago. There is the string of the hotel buses, drawn up all ready for the train, and as the train rounds in and stops hissing and panting at the platform, you can hear above all other sounds the cry of the brakesmen and the porters:

“Mariposa! Mariposa!”

And as we listen, the cry grows fainter and fainter in our ears and we are sitting here again in the leather chairs of the Mausoleum Club, talking of the little Town in the Sunshine that once we knew.

Colophon

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
was published in 1912 by
Stephen Leacock.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Dave Halliday,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2002 by
Gardner Buchanan, David Widger, and The Distributed Proofreaders Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
Mr. Smith,
a painting completed in 1912 by
Cyrus Cuneo.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
June 18, 2019, 9:51 p.m.
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Uncopyright

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