se nervous pressures, had been swept away
without diet, without tiresome exercise. He was young again--and he
almost ran the Pontiac into a ditch at the side of the road....

If it was a dream, he decided, it was a dream he was going to enjoy. He
recalled what Shaw had said about youth being such a wonderful thing it
was a pity to waste it on children. And he knew that he, at any rate,
was no child, whatever the body that had so miraculously been restored
to him.

The unhappy Pontiac cleared another hilltop and Lincolnville lay
stretched out before Coulter, naked and exposed, stripped of its summer
foliage. He had forgotten how dominated it was by the five church
steeples--Unitarian, Episcopal, Trinitarian, Roman Catholic and Swedish
Reform. There was no spire atop the concrete-and-stucco pillared
building in which the Christian Scientists held their Sunday readings.

Half-consciously he dug for a cigar in his breast pocket, looked with
mild surprise on the straight-stemmed pipe he found there. He had
forgotten that he once smoked a pipe as completely as he had forgotten
the churchly domination of his home town.

Even though Lincolnville remained fixed in his memory as it had looked
twenty years ago--as it looked now awaiting his belated return--he was
aware of many anachronisms while tooling the Pontiac slowly along
Clinton Street. He had become used to the many outer changes of the past
two decades, was unable completely to suppress surprise at not finding
them present on his return.

For one thing there was the vast amount of overhead wiring. Coulter had
forgotten how its lacework of insulation and poles took up space even in
a comparatively small community. He had long since forgotten the English
sparrows, erstwhile avian pest of America, that were to vanish so
swiftly with the final abolition of the horse.

There were more horses than he recalled, parked here and there among the
shoppers' automobiles. And the cars themselves looked like refugees from
a well-aged television movie, all straight-up-and-down windshields and
unbuilt-in fenders and wooden spoked or wire wheels. He suspected the
Pontiac he was driving would look as odd to him once he got out and
examined it.

A dark-overcoated policeman, lounging against the front of the Rexall
store at the main intersection, lifted a mittened hand in casual salute.
Coulter replied in kind, drove on through the Center, took the fork past
the old library with the s