Read "The Queen of Sheba and my Cousin the Colonel" by Thomas Bailey Aldrich online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was still dark enough the next morning to allow the great chimneys / to show off their colored fires effectively, when Lynde passed through / the dingy main street of K -- -and struck into a road which led to the / hill country. A short distance beyond the town, while he was turning in / the saddle to observe the singular effect of the lurid light upon the / landscape, a freight-train shot obliquely across the road within five / rods of his horse's head, the engine flinging great flakes of fiery / spume from its nostrils, and shrieking like a maniac as it plunged into / a tunnel through a spur of the hills. Mary went sideways, like a crab, / for the next three quarters of a mile.
To most young men the expedition which Edward Lynde had undertaken / would have seemed unattractive and monotonous to the last degree; but / Lynde's somewhat sedentary habits had made him familiar with his own / company. When one is young and well read and amiable, there is really / no better company than one's self -- as a steady thing. We are in a / desperate strait indeed if we chance at any age to tire of this / invisible but ever-present comrade; for he is not to be thrown over / during life. Before now, men have become so weary of him, so bored by / him, that they have attempted to escape, by suicide; but it is a / question if death itself altogether rids us of him.