eminding him constantly of the animal kingdom, as figured to
imagination in childhood, of the rat that wanted his long tail again, or
of the horse that will never win a race,--on the land of lanterns and
lying, of silver pheasants and--of scamps.

The faster the good ship sailed, the stronger the east-wind blew,
the swifter ran the life-current in the veins of the returning
exile,--friend, countryman, lover.

As the vessel neared the coast of Massachusetts, and the land-breeze
brought to his eager nostrils the odors of his native orchards, or the
aromatic fragrance of the pine, and the indescribable impression, on all
his senses, of home, the fresh love of country rushed purely through his
veins, bubbled warmly about the place where his heart used to beat, and
rose to his brain in soft, sweet imaginations. Vivid pictures of past
and future; identical in all their essential features, swam before his
closed eyes, languid now from excess of pleasure. Again and again he
drew in the breath of home, and felt it sweeter than the gales from the
Spice Islands or odors from Araby the Blest. Hovering before his fancy,
came sweet eyes, full of bewildering light, half-reproachful, half-sad,
and all-bewitching; a form of such exquisite grace that he wondered not
it swam and undulated before him; over all, the rose-hue of youth, and
the smooth, sweet charm of lip and hand that memory brought him, in that
last timid caress under the pear-tree after sunset.

As soon as he could possibly so arrange his affairs in Boston as to
admit of his taking a journey to Walton, Swan determined to do so. But
affairs will not always consent to an arrangement; and although he
exerted himself to gain a week's leisure, it was not till the Indian
summer was past that he took his place in the stage-coach which plied
between Boston and Walton.

How very short seemed the time since he was last on this road! Yet how
much had things changed! Fifteen years! Was it possible he had been gone
so long? How rapidly they had gone over himself! He felt scarcely a day
older. The stage-coach was aptly termed "Accommodation," and Swan had
great amusement, as he sat with the driver on the box, in noting the
differences in the aspect of houses and people, since his own last ride
over the same road. New villages had sprung up here and there, while
already more than one manufacturing establishment showed the Northern
tendencies; and the elements of progress peeped from ev