keen enjoyment.
The cows were going home from pasture, up shady barn-lanes, into the
grayer shadows about the houses on either side of the road, in whose
windows lights were beginning to glimmer. Solid old homesteads they
were, stone or brick, never wood. Out in these Western settlements, a
hundred years ago, they built durable homes, curiously enough, more than
in the Northern States; planted oaks about them, that bore the strength
of the earth up to heaven in sturdy arms, shaming the graceful,
uncertain elm of shallower soils. Just such old farm-houses as those,
Blecker thought, would turn out such old-time moulded men as McKinstry:
houses whose orchards still held on to the Waldower and Smoke-house
apples; their gardens gay with hollyhocks and crimson prince's-feather;
on the book-shelves the "Spectator" and "Gentleman's Magazine." The
women of them kept up the old-fashioned knitting-parties, and a
donation-visit to the pastor once a year; and the men were all gone to
the war, to keep the Union as it was in their fathers' time, and would
doubtless vote the conservative ticket next election because their
fathers did, which would make the war a horrible farce. The town,
Blecker thought, had rooted itself in between the hills with as solid
a persistence as the prejudices of its builders. Obstinately steep
streets, shaded by gnarled locust-trees; houses drawn back from the
sidewalks, in surly dread of all new-comers; the very smoke, vaporing
through the sky, had defiance in it of the outer barbarous world and its
vulgar newness. Yet the town had an honest country heart in it, if it
was a bit gray and crusty with age. Blecker, knowing it as he did, did
not wonder the boys who left it named a village for it out in Kansas,
trying to fancy themselves at home,--or that one old beggar in it asked
to be buried in the middle of the street, "So's I kin hear the stages
a-comin' in, an' know if the old place is a-gittin' on."

There seemed to be a migration from it to-night: they met, every minute,
buggies, old-fashioned carriages, horsemen.

"Going out to camp," McKinstry said; "the boys all have some one to bid
them good-bye."

What a lonely, reserved voice the man had! Blecker had the curiosity of
all sensitive men to know the soul-history of people; he glanced again
keenly in McKinstry's face. Pshaw! one might as well ask their story
from the deaf and dumb. But that they were dumb,--there was hint of a
tragedy in that!

E