ng the road back to the bridge I kept picking off
little pieces of scaly chalk from the dried water gullies, and breaking
them up in my hands.

When I came upon the Marshalls' delivery horse, tied in the shade, the
girls had already taken their baskets and gone down the east road which
wound through the sand and scrub. I could hear them calling to each other.
The elder bushes did not grow back in the shady ravines between the
bluffs, but in the hot, sandy bottoms along the stream, where their roots
were always in moisture and their tops in the sun. The blossoms were
unusually luxuriant and beautiful that summer.

I followed a cattle path through the thick underbrush until I came to a
slope that fell away abruptly to the water's edge. A great chunk of the
shore had been bitten out by some spring freshet, and the scar was masked
by elder bushes, growing down to the water in flowery terraces. I did not
touch them. I was overcome by content and drowsiness and by the warm
silence about me. There was no sound but the high, sing-song buzz of wild
bees and the sunny gurgle of the water underneath. I peeped over the edge
of the bank to see the little stream that made the noise; it flowed along
perfectly clear over the sand and gravel, cut off from the muddy main
current by a long sandbar. Down there, on the lower shelf of the bank, I
saw Antonia, seated alone under the pagoda-like elders. She looked up when
she heard me, and smiled, but I saw that she had been crying. I slid down
into the soft sand beside her and asked her what was the matter.

"It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell," she said softly.
"We have this flower very much at home, in the old country. It always grew
in our yard and my papa had a green bench and a table under the bushes. In
summer, when they were in bloom, he used to sit there with his friend that
played the trombone. When I was little I used to go down there to hear
them talk--beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country."

"What did they talk about?" I asked her.

She sighed and shook her head. "Oh, I don't know! About music, and the
woods, and about God, and when they were young." She turned to me suddenly
and looked into my eyes. "You think, Jimmy, that maybe my father's spirit
can go back to those old places?"

I told her about the feeling of her father's presence I had on that winter
day when my grandparents had gone over to see his dead body and I was left
alone in th