d in Aggie's dark and roguish
eyes!

To a stranger, Burr Oak--my Burr Oak--even in Seventy-two was only a
pleasant meeting place of prairie lanes on the margin of a forest, but
to me it had been a temple of magic. I had but to shut my eyes to
desolating changes, turning my vision inward, in order to see myself (a
stocky awkward boy in a Sunday suit with a torturing collar) standing on
the porch waiting to see those white-clad maidens pass into the
vestibule.

Too shy in those days to meet their eyes, too worshipful to ever hope
for word or smile, I remained their silent adorer. Here and now I set
down the tribute which I could not then express:

O maids to whom I never spoke, to whom
My dreaming ran in lonely field,
Because of you I saw the bloom
Of Maytime more abundantly revealed.
From you each bud new magic caught.
When you were near, my skies
Were brighter, for your beauty brought
A poet's rapture to my eyes.

Men tell me you are bent and gray,
And worn with toil and pain;
And so I pray the Wheel of Chance
May never set us face to face again.
Better that I should think of you
As you then were, strong and sweet,
Walking your joyous sunlit way
Between the wheat and roses of the lane--
_Pass on, O weary women of today--_
_Remain forever 'mid the roses and the wheat,_
_O girls with laughing lips and dancing feet!_

That ride and the people I met closed a gate for me. I accomplished a
painful relinquishment. That noon-day sun divided my past from my
present as with the stroke of a flaming sword. Up to this moment I had
retained, in formless fashion, a belief that I could some time and
somehow reach out and regain, at least in part, the substance of the
life I had once lived here in this scene. Now I confessed that not only
was my youth gone but that the friends and the place of my youth had
vanished. My heart, wrung with a measureless regret filled my throat
with pain, and as I looked in my father's face I perceived that he, too,
was feeling the force of Time's inexorable decree.

We started homeward in silence, speaking only now and then when some
object made itself recognizable to us.

"I shall never ride this lane again," I said as we were nearing the
town. "It has been a sad experience. The world of my boyhood--the world
we both knew--is utterly gone. It exists only in your memory and mine. I
want to get away--back to Zulime a