Said Mr. Bartlett when they were all seated: "Now, children, you may order just exactly what you'd like. You first, Suzanna."
"Well," she said, without hesitation, "I should like some golden brown toast that isn't burned, with lots of butter on it, and a cup of cocoa with a marshmallow floating on top, and at the very last, a dish of striped ice cream with a cherry right in the middle."
Mr. Bartlett wrote the order rapidly on a card. Each of the children spoke out his deepest, perhaps his long-cherished desire. Some of the dishes were secretly and mercifully modified by Mrs. Bartlett, who sat in enjoyment of the scene.
"It's like a dream, Mrs. Bartlett," said Suzanna when, dinner finished, they were all back once more in the parlor car. "You don't think we'll wake up, do you?"
"No, I think not; you'll simply get wider and wider awake."
But, as the hours crept on and as she watched the flying landscape, the reaction to all her excitement came and a haze fell over everything, and she slept, to awaken some time later, full of contrition.
She spoke anxiously to Mrs. Bartlett: "Oh, I appreciated it all, Mrs. Bartlett, but my eyes just closed down of themselves," she said.
Mrs. Bartlett smiled. "It's a long journey," she said, "but we'll soon see the end of it."
At nine o'clock the train stopped for the first time since dark had fallen. "Here we are," cried Mr. Bartlett. And in a few moments they were all standing on the platform of a little railroad station waiting while carriages were being secured to take them for the night to a hotel nestling on the top of a tall hill.
Morning came--a rather misty morning that promised better as the day advanced. Suzanna, sleeping with Maizie in a small room on the second floor of the hotel, woke, gazed about her unfamiliar surroundings, sprang out of bed, and in her bare feet ran to the window. There before her was a magnificent group of mountains, wooded with majestic trees whose tops seemed to touch the sky. Beneath the mountains, just at their feet, a river ran, the sun dancing on its breast. Suzanna held her breath in sheer awe; she could not move even to call Maizie. She felt as though something great out there in the mountains called to her spirit and though she wished to answer she could not do so.