wn on his neck in little tufts. He tied my team
with two flourishes of his hands, and nodded when I asked him if his
mother was at home. As he glanced at me, his face dimpled with a seizure
of irrelevant merriment, and he shot up the windmill tower with a
lightness that struck me as disdainful. I knew he was peering down at me
as I walked toward the house.

Ducks and geese ran quacking across my path. White cats were sunning
themselves among yellow pumpkins on the porch steps. I looked through
the wire screen into a big, light kitchen with a white floor. I saw a
long table, rows of wooden chairs against the wall, and a shining range
in one corner. Two girls were washing dishes at the sink, laughing
and chattering, and a little one, in a short pinafore, sat on a stool
playing with a rag baby. When I asked for their mother, one of the girls
dropped her towel, ran across the floor with noiseless bare feet, and
disappeared. The older one, who wore shoes and stockings, came to the
door to admit me. She was a buxom girl with dark hair and eyes, calm and
self-possessed.

'Won't you come in? Mother will be here in a minute.'

Before I could sit down in the chair she offered me, the miracle
happened; one of those quiet moments that clutch the heart, and take
more courage than the noisy, excited passages in life. Antonia came in
and stood before me; a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly
brown hair a little grizzled. It was a shock, of course. It always is,
to meet people after long years, especially if they have lived as much
and as hard as this woman had. We stood looking at each other. The eyes
that peered anxiously at me were--simply Antonia's eyes. I had seen no
others like them since I looked into them last, though I had looked at
so many thousands of human faces. As I confronted her, the changes grew
less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full
vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me,
speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.

'My husband's not at home, sir. Can I do anything?'

'Don't you remember me, Antonia? Have I changed so much?'

She frowned into the slanting sunlight that made her brown hair look
redder than it was. Suddenly her eyes widened, her whole face seemed to
grow broader. She caught her breath and put out two hard-worked hands.

'Why, it's Jim! Anna, Yulka, it's Jim Burden!' She had no sooner caught
my hands tha