How few of
those I knew were there to greet me! Walter and Charles were dead, Maud
and Lena were both married, and Burton was preaching somewhere in the
West.

Six short years had made many changes in the little town and it was in
thinking upon these changes that I reached a full realization of the
fact that I was no longer a "promising boy" of the prairie but a man,
with a notion of human life and duty and responsibility which was
neither cheerful nor resigned. I was returning as from deep valleys,
from the most alien climate.

Looking at the sky above me, feeling the rush of the earth beneath my
feet I saw how much I had dared and how little, how pitifully little I
had won. Over me the ragged rainclouds swept, obscuring the stars and in
their movement and in the feeling of the dawn lay something illimitable
and prophetic. Such moments do not come to men often--but to me for an
hour, life was painfully purposeless. "What does it all mean?" I asked
myself.

At last the train came, and as it rattled away to the north and I drew
closer to the scenes of my boyhood, my memory quickened. The Cedar
rippling over its limestone ledges, the gray old mill and the pond where
I used to swim, the farm-houses with their weedy lawns, all seemed not
only familiar but friendly, and when at last I reached the station (the
same grimy little den from which I had started forth six years before),
I rose from my seat with the air of a world-traveller and descended upon
the warped and splintered platform, among my one time friends and
neighbors, with quickened pulse and seeking eye.

It was the fourth of July and a crowd was at the station, but though I
recognized half the faces, not one of them lightened at sight of me. The
'bus driver, the ragged old dray-man (scandalously profane), the common
loafers shuffling about, chewing and spitting, seemed absolutely
unchanged. One or two elderly citizens eyed me closely as I slung my
little Boston valise with a long strap over my shoulder and started up
the billowing board sidewalk toward the center of the town, but I gave
out no word of recognition. Indeed I took a boyish pride in the
disguising effect of my beard.

How small and flat and leisurely the village seemed. The buildings which
had once been so imposing in my eyes were now of very moderate elevation
indeed, and the opera house was almost indistinguishable from the
two-story structures which flanked it; but the trees had increased in