he few gray hairs which had come
into his beard and, as he stood in conversation with one of the
merchants of the town, his nasal voice, his formal speech and the
grandiloquent gesture of his right hand brought back to me all the
stories I had heard of his drinking and of his wife's heroic rescuing
expeditions to neighboring saloons. A strange, unsatisfactory end to a
man of great natural ability.

Following him came a young girl leading a child of ten. I knew them at
once. Ella McKee had been of the size of the little one, her sister,
when I went away, and nothing gave me a keener realization of the years
which had passed than the flowering of the child I had known into this
charming maiden of eighteen. Her resemblance to her sister Flora was too
marked to be mistaken, and the little one by her side had the same
flashing eyes and radiant smile with which both of her grown up sisters
were endowed. Their beauty fairly glorified the dingy street as they
walked past my window.

Then an old farmer, bent and worn of frame, halted before me to talk
with a merchant. This was David Babcock, Burton's father, one of our old
time neighbors, a little more bent, a little thinner, a little
grayer--that was all, and as I listened to his words I asked, "What
purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years with no
increase of leisure, with no growth in mental grace?"

There was a wistful note in his voice which went straight to my heart.
He said: "No, our wheat crop ain't a-going to amount to much this year.
Of course we don't try to raise much grain--it's mostly stock, but I
thought I'd try wheat again. I wisht we could get back to the good old
days of wheat raising--it w'ant so confining as stock-raisin'." His good
days were also in the past!

As I walked the street I met several neighbors from Dry Run as well as
acquaintances from the Grove. Nearly all, even the young men, looked
worn and weather-beaten and some appeared both silent and sad. Laughter
was curiously infrequent and I wondered whether in my days on the farm
they had all been as rude of dress, as misshapen of form and as wistful
of voice as they now seemed to me to be. "Have times changed? Has a
spirit of unrest and complaining developed in the American farmer?"

I perceived the town from the triple viewpoint of a former resident, a
man from the city, and a reformer, and every minutest detail of dress,
tone and gesture revealed new meaning to me. Fanche