the silence of the night
that it was as he wished.

Yet always, always, from weary week to weary week, he rehearsed the
scenes. They were his theatre, his opera, his library, his lecture hall.

He rehearsed them again there on the cars. He never wearied of them. To
be sure, other thoughts had come to him at night. Much that to most men
seems complex and puzzling had grown to appear simple to him. In a way
his brain had quickened and deepened through the years of solitude. He
had thought out a great many things. He had read a few good books and
digested them, and the visions in his heart had kept him from being
bitter.

Yet, suddenly confronted with liberty, turned loose like a pastured
colt, without master or rein, he felt only confusion and dismay. He
might be expected to feel exultation. He experienced only fright. It is
precisely the same with the liberated colt.

The train pulled into a bustling station, in which the multitudinous
noises were thrown back again from the arched iron roof. The relentless
haste of all the people was inexpressibly cruel to the man who looked
from the window wondering whither he would go, and if, among all the
thousands that made up that vast and throbbing city, he would ever find
a friend.

For a moment David longed even for that unmaternal mother who had
forgotten him in the hour of his distress; but she had been dead for
many years.

The train stopped. Every one got out. David forced himself to his feet
and followed. He had been driven back into the world. It would have
seemed less terrible to have been driven into a desert. He walked
toward the great iron gates, seeing the people and hearing the noises
confusedly.

As he entered the space beyond the grating some one caught him by the
arm. It was a little middle-aged woman in plain clothes, and with sad
gray eyes.

"Is this David?" said she.

He did not speak, but his face answered her.

"I knew you were coming to-day. I've waited all these years, David. You
didn't think I believed what you said in that letter did you? This way,
David,--this is the way home."

Two Pioneers

IT was the year of the small-pox. The Pawnees had died in their cold
tepees by the fifties, the soldiers lay dead in the trenches without the
fort, and many a gay French voyageur, who had thought to go singing down
the Missouri on his fur-laden raft in the springtime, would never again
see the lights of St. Louis, or the coin of the mighty Cho