All breakfastless they hurried aboard the Boston train on the Eastern Road, and all along that line (which is built to show how uninteresting the earth can be when she is 'ennuyee' of both sea and land), Basil's life became a struggle to construct a meal from the fragmentary opportunities of twenty different stations where they stopped five minutes for refreshments.

At one place he achieved two cups of shameless chickory, at another three sardines, at a third a dessert of elderly bananas.
"Home again, home again, from a foreign shore!" they softly sang as the successive courses of this feast were disposed of.
The drouth and heat, which they had briefly escaped during their sojourn in Canada, brooded sovereign upon the tiresome landscape.

The red granite rocks were as if red-hot; the banks of the deep cuts were like ash heaps; over the fields danced the sultry atmosphere; they fancied that they almost heard the grasshoppers sing above the rattle of the train.

When they reached Boston at last, they were dustier than most of us would like to be a hundred years hence.

The whole city was equally dusty; and they found the trees in the square before their own door gray with dust.