"
This time the look which Mrs. Sampson gave Snaffle told him so plainly
what she wanted him to do that he spoke at once, her almost
imperceptible nod showing him that he was on the right track.
"Oh, a railroad is always the ruin of a small town," he said, "unless
it is its terminus. It sucks all the life out of the villages along the
way. You go along any of the lines in Massachusetts, and you will find
that while the towns have been helped by the road, the small villages
have been knocked into a cocked hat. All the young people have left
them; all the folks in the neighborhood go to some city to do their
trading, and the stuffing is knocked out of things generally."
Mrs. Sampson looked at Snaffle with a thoroughly gratified expression.
"I don't know much about the business part of the question, of course,"
she said, "but I do know that a railroad takes all the young men out of
a village. A woman I boarded with at Ashmont last year wrote to me the
other day in the greatest distress because her only son had left her.
She said it was all the railroad, and her letter was really pathetic."
"Oh, that's a woman's way of looking at it," rejoined Greenfield, the
greatest struggle of whose life, as Mrs. Sampson was perfectly well
aware, was to keep at home his only child, a youth just coming to
manhood. "It is easy enough for boys to get away nowadays, and just
having a railroad at the door wouldn't make any great difference.
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