n vegetable and salads look like the
display-window of a florist.

Now the youth looked out upon a typical city street, the dwellings
on either side being four and five story tenement houses, occupied by
artisans and mechanics.

A few quarreling children paddled sticks, or sailed chip boats, in the
gutters.

"Come on, now! Get a move on you, Hi!" sounded the raucous voice of
Daniel Dwight the elder, behind him in the store.

Hiram went at his task with neither interest nor energy.

All about him the houses and the street were grimy and depressing. It
had been a gray and murky morning; but overhead a patch of sky was as
blue as June. He suddenly saw a flock of pigeons wheeling above the
tunnel of the street, and the boy's heart leaped at the sight.

He longed for freedom. He wished he could fly, up, up, up above the
housetops and the streets, like those feathered fowl.

He knew he was stagnating here in this dingy store; the deadly sameness
of his life chafed him sorely.

"I'd take another job if I could find one," he muttered, stirring up the
bunches of yellowing radish leaves and trying to make them look fresh.
"And Old Daniel is likely to give me a chance to hunt a job pretty
sudden--the way he talks. But if Dan, Junior, told him what happened
yesterday, I wonder the old gentleman hasn't been after me with a sharp
stick."

From somewhere--out of the far-distant open country where it had been
breathing all night the quivering pines, and brown swamps, and the
white and gray checkered fields that would soon be upturned by the
plowshares--a vagrant wind wandered into the city street.

The lingering, but faint perfume wafted here from God's open world to
die in this man-made town inspired in the youth thoughts and desires
that had been struggling within him for expression for days past.

"I know what I want," said Hiram Strong, aloud. "I want to get back to
the land!"

The progress of the day was not inducive to a hopeful outlook for
Hiram. When closing time came he was heartily sick of the business of
storekeeping, if he never had been before.

And when he dragged himself home to the boarding house, he found the
atmosphere there as dreary as the street itself. The boarders were
grumpy and Mrs. Atterson was in a tearful state again.

Hiram could not stay in his room. It was a narrow, cold place at the end
of the back hall at the top of the house. There was a little, painted
bureau in it, one leg of which