bination kitchen-dining-and-living room.

"Chops taste good, Hosey?"

"Grand. But you oughtn't to be cooking around like this. We'll eat out
to-morrow night somewhere, and go to a show."

"You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?"

"It's the life, mother! It's the life!"

His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department-store
kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream
whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily
with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even
known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used
to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. The price
of butter, eggs, milk, cream and the like horrified his Wisconsin
cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market
before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with
tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the
buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time.

Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had known
back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around, naturally,
in his business. This man had been a steady butter-and-egg acquaintance,
one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous farming community. For
his family's sake he had moved into town, a ruddy, rufous-bearded,
clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had sold the farm with a fine
profit and had taken a boxlike house on Franklin Street. He had nothing
to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out on the porch early, very early
summer mornings.

You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant
there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he
had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its
black strength and its green tendrils, down, down, until he ceased to
struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had
thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.

"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just
seemed to kind of pine away."

It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this
memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market.
Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of
eggs, the butter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness
to him as to amount to an actua