county paper.

[Pg 11]

[Pg 12]

The situation I explained briefly to Prudence and Malachy, and swore them into the conspiracy. I threw a few clothes into a small trunk, despatched a hypocritical note of regret to Miss Rogers, caught the noon train, and was soon beyond the danger line. Mrs. Lot, casting an apprehensive glance behind her, could not have dreaded more fearful consequences than I, looking back on the calamity I was evading. But as we went on and on into the cool, quiet country, and felt the soft air stealing down from the nearing mountains, I began to experience a lively sense of relief and pleasure, and to wonder why I had so long delayed a visit to my boyhood home.

I am sorry for the man whose childhood knew only the roar and bustle and swiftly shifting scenes of the city. For him there is no return in after years, no illusion to be[Pg 13] renewed, no joy of youth to be substantiated. His habitation has passed away or yielded to the inroads of commerce, his landmarks have vanished, and he is bewildered by the strange sights that time and trade have put upon his memories. But time has no terrors for the country-bred boy. The Almighty does not change the mountains and the rivers and the great rocks that fortify the scenery, and man is slow to push back into the far meadowlands and the hillsides, and destroy the simple, primitive life of the fathers.

[Pg 13]

All of the joy that such a returning pilgrim might have I felt when I left the train at the junction, and, scorning the pony engine and combination car supplied in later years by the railway company as a tribute to progress, set out to walk the two miles to the village. Every foot of the country I had played over as a boy. Here was the field where Deacon Skinner did his "hayin'"; just beyond the deacon raised his tobacco crop. That roof over there,[Pg 14] which I once detected as the top of Jim Pomeroy's barn, reminded me of the day of the raisin', when I sprained my ankle and thereby saved myself a thrashing for running away. Here was Pickerel Pond, the scene of many miraculous draughts, and now I crossed Peach brook which babbled along under the road just as saucily and untiringly as if it had slept all these years and was just awaking to fresh life. A hundred rods up the brook was the Widow Parsons's farm, and I knew that if I went through the side gate, cut across the barnyard, and kept down to the left, I should find that same old stump on which Bill Howland sat the day he caught the biggest dace 

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