y
summer shower was drenching the town; the very rain was hot, and the
earth steamed lustily. I feared, my plan was spoiled, my meeting at
the gate after long years of patient and hopeful waiting. But the rain
passed over, and I was again under way. Now every inch of the land was
familiar: I recognized old houses and barns and strips of fence and
streams that had not been in my mind once in all these years. I knew
every block of forest that had been left on the border of the upland
fields, and all the meadows, marshy or dry: the very faces of the
people seemed to recall some one I had known before. The hills were
like lessons learned by heart; and now I came upon the actual haunts
of my school-boy days--the wood where we gave our picnics; the red
house, a little out of the village, where one of the boys
lived--strangely enough, the house I remembered, but the boy's looks
and name had gone from me--and then the train stopped. I felt a
tingling sensation, as if the blood were coming to the surface all
over me.

A switchman, and a stranger, waved us welcome with a yard of flaming
bunting. I hurried out of the car and alighted within half a mile of
Heartsease. On the platform, where I had parted with my schoolmates
fifteen years before, I waited till the train had passed onward and
out of sight. I was alone: the switchman asked no odds of me, but
furled his bunting and immediately withdrew. For a moment I looked
about me in bewilderment. I think I could have turned back had I been
encouraged to do so, for I felt half guilty in thus surprising my
friends. A moment later I plucked up heart and struck into the road
that leads up to the village.

The road has a margin of grass and weeds, and there are meadows on
both sides. I walked in the very middle of it, with my portmanteau in
my hand, and looked straight ahead. Before me lay the village, a
cluster of white houses embowered in trees. It was sunset; the rain
had washed the leaves and laid the dust in the road; the air was
exquisitely fragrant and of uncommon softness; the white spire of the
village church, flanked by a long line of poplars, was gilded with a
sunbeam, but the lowly roofs of the villagers were bathed in the
radiant twilight that had deepened under the western hills. Cattle
were lowing in the meadows; the crickets chirped everywhere; a barbed
swallow clove the air like an arrow whose force is nigh spent; and a
child's voice rang out on the edge of the villag