as he trod the
pasture slopes, calling back the remembrance of his childhood. Here
was the place where two lads, older than himself, had killed a
terrible woodchuck at bay in the angle of a great rock; and just
beyond was the sunny spot where he had picked a bunch of pink and
white anemones under a prickly barberry thicket, to give to Abby
Harran in morning school. She had put them into her desk, and let them
wilt there, but she was pleased when she took them. Abby Harran, the
little teacher's grandmother, was a year older than he, and had
wakened the earliest thought of love in his youthful breast.

It was almost time to catch the first sight of his birthplace. From
the knoll just ahead he had often seen the light of his mother's lamp,
as he came home from school on winter afternoons; but when he reached
the knoll the old house was gone, and so was the great walnut-tree
that grew beside it, and a pang of disappointment shot through this
devout pilgrim's heart. He never had doubted that the old farm was
somebody's home still, and had counted upon the pleasure of spending a
night there, and sleeping again in that room under the roof, where the
rain sounded loud, and the walnut branches brushed to and fro when the
wind blew, as if they were the claws of tigers. He hurried across the
worn-out fields, long ago turned into sheep pastures, where the last
year's tall grass and golden-rod stood gray and winter-killed; tracing
the old walls and fences, and astonished to see how small the fields
had been. The prosperous owner of Western farming lands could not help
remembering those widespread luxuriant acres, and the broad outlooks
of his Western home.

It was difficult at first to find exactly where the house had stood;
even the foundations had disappeared. At last in the long, faded grass
he discovered the doorstep, and near by was a little mound where the
great walnut-tree stump had been. The cellar was a mere dent in the
sloping ground; it had been filled in by the growing grass and slow
processes of summer and winter weather. But just at the pilgrim's
right were some thorny twigs of an old rosebush. A sudden brightening
of memory brought to mind the love that his mother--dead since his
fifteenth year--had kept for this sweetbrier. How often she had wished
that she had brought it to her new home! So much had changed in the
world, so many had gone into the world of light, and here the faithful
blooming thing was yet alive!