p the window-shade in the Pullman
to watch for the earliest morning outlining of old Lebanon on the
southern horizon.

There had been no home-going for him at the close of his first year in
the sectarian school. The principal had reported him somewhat backward
in his studies for his age,--which was true enough,--and had intimated
that a summer spent with the preceptor who had the vacation charge of
the school buildings would be invaluable to a boy of such excellent
natural parts. So Tom had gone into semi-solitary confinement for three
months with a man who thought in the dead languages and spoke in terms
of ancient history, studying with sullen resentment in his heart, and
charging his imprisonment to his preacher-uncle, who was, indeed,
chiefly responsible.

He had mourned that loss of liberty all through his second year, and was
conscious the while that it would prove the parent of a still greater
loss. It is the exile's anchorage in a shifting world to think of the
home haven as unchanged and unchanging; as a place where by and by the
thread of life as it was may be knotted up with that of life as it shall
be. But Tom remembered that he had left Paradise in the midst of
convulsive upheavals, and was correspondingly fearful.

The sickening sense of unfamiliarity seized him when the train stopped
for breakfast in the city which had once been the village of the single
muddy street. The genius of progress had transformed it so completely
that there was nothing but the huge, backgrounding mass of Lebanon,
visible from the windows of the station breakfast-room, to identify the
grave of the old and the birthplace of the new.

The boy laid desperate eye-holds on the comforting solidity of the
background, and would not loose them when the train sped away southward
again through mile-long yards with their boundaries picked out by
black-vomiting factory chimneys. The mountain, at least, was unchanged,
and there might be hope for the country beyond.

But the homesickness returned with renewed qualms when the train had
doubled the nose of Lebanon and threaded its way among the hills to the
Paradise portal. Gordonia, of the single side-track, had grown into a
small iron town, with the Chiawassee plant flanking a good half-mile of
the railway; with a cindery street or two, and a scummy wave of
operatives' cottages and laborers' shacks spreading up the hillsides
which were stripped bare of their trees and undergrowth.

Tom's