mpted with the exception of the stove, the
chair, a tilting lounge in the small room, and a few old iron pots and
fryingpans. Stebbins gathered corn, dug potatoes, and put them on the
stove to cook, then he hurried out to the village store and bought a few
slices of bacon, half a dozen eggs, a quarter of a pound of cheap tea,
and some salt. When he re-entered the house he looked as he had not for
years. He was beaming. "Come, this is a palace," he said to himself,
and chuckled with pure joy. He had come out of the awful empty spaces of
homeless life into home. He was a man who had naturally strong domestic
instincts. If he had spent the best years of his life in a home instead
of a prison, the finest in him would have been developed. As it was,
this was not even now too late. When he had cooked his bacon and eggs
and brewed his tea, when the vegetables were done and he was seated upon
the rickety chair, with his supper spread before him on an old board
propped on sticks, he was supremely happy. He ate with a relish which
seemed to reach his soul. He was at home, and eating, literally, at his
own board. As he ate he glanced from time to time at the two windows,
with broken panes of glass and curtainless. He was not afraid--that
was nonsense; he had never been a cowardly man, but he felt the need of
curtains or something before his windows to shut out the broad vast face
of nature, or perhaps prying human eyes. Somebody might espy the light
in the house and wonder. He had a candle stuck in an old bottle by
way of illumination. Still, although he would have preferred to have
curtains before those windows full of the blank stare of night, he WAS
supremely happy.

After he had finished his supper he looked longingly at his pipe. He
hesitated for a second, for he realized the necessity of saving his
precious tobacco; then he became reckless: such enormous good fortune
as a home must mean more to follow; it must be the first of a series of
happy things. He filled his pipe and smoked. Then he went to bed on the
old couch in the other room, and slept like a child until the sun shone
through the trees in flickering lines. Then he rose, went out to the
brook which ran near the house, splashed himself with water, returned
to the house, cooked the remnant of the eggs and bacon, and ate his
breakfast with the same exultant peace with which he had eaten his
supper the night before. Then he sat down in the doorway upon the sunken
sill