e Italian
apple-man--who would never again have so simple a customer for his
slightly damaged fruit; of several tall, proud, well-frosted church
spires now turning rosy in the sunrise; of a big, handsome house
standing in a fashionable street, with black coal smoke pouring out of
the chimneys. There the friends of his boyhood "boarded"; there they
were now, asleep in luxurious beds, or gone away for the holidays, he
knew not which: all he did know was that they were gone far away from
him along life's other pathways.

Soon the shops on each side were succeeded by homesteads; gradually
these stood farther apart as farm-houses set back from the highroad;
the street had become a turnpike, they were in open country and the lad
was on his way to his father and mother.

In the afternoon, at one of the stops for watering horses, he had his
traps and trappings put out. From this place a mud road wound across
the country to his neighborhood; and at a point some two miles distant,
a pair of bars tapped it as an outlet and inlet for the travel on his
father's land.

Leaving his things at the roadside farmhouse with the promise that he
would return for them, the lad struck out--not by the lane, but
straight across country.

It was a mild winter day without wind, without character--one of the
days on which Nature seems to take no interest in herself and creates
no interest in others. The sky was overcrowded with low, ragged clouds,
without discernible order or direction. Nowhere a yellow sunbeam
glinting on any object, but vast jets of misty radiance shot downward
in far-diverging lines toward the world: as though above the clouds
were piled the waters of light and this were scant escaping spray.

He walked on, climbing the fences, coming on the familiar sights of
winter woods and fields. Having been away from them for the first time
and that during more than a year, with what feelings he now beheld them!

Crows about the corn shocks, flying leisurely to the stake-and-ridered
fence: there alighting with their tails pointing toward him and their
heads turned sideways over one shoulder; but soon presenting their
breasts seeing he did not hunt. The solitary caw of one of them--that
thin, indifferent comment of their sentinel, perched on the silver-gray
twig of a sycamore. In another field the startled flutter of field
larks from pale-yellow bushes of ground-apple. Some boys out
rabbit-hunting in the holidays, with red cheeks and