Without further ado he packed his things and went.

II

There was no brass band to meet him. At the hotel the clerk read his
name without emotion. When he required the best two rooms in the hotel,
and a bath at that, the clerk looked suspicious:

"Any baggage?"

"Three trunks and a grip."

"What line do you carry? Will you use the sample-room?"

"Don't carry any line. Don't want any sample-room."

He walked out to see the town. It had so much the same look that it
seemed to have been embalmed. Here were the old stores, the old signs,
apparently the same fly-specked wares in the windows.

He read Doctor Barnby's rusty shingle. Wasn't that the same swaybacked
horse dozing at the hitching-post?

Here was the rough hill road where he used to coast as a child. There
stood Mrs. Hooker on the lawn with a hose, sprinkling the street, the
trees, the grass, the oleander in its tub and the moon-flower on the
porch. He seemed to have left her twenty years ago in that attitude with
the same arch of water springing from the nozzle.

He paused before the same gap-toothed street-crossing of yore, and he
started across it as across the stepping-stones of a dry stream. A
raw-boned horse whirled around the corner, just avoiding his toes. It
was followed by a bouncing grocery-wagon on the side of whose seat
dangled a shirt-sleeved youth who might have been Shelby himself a score
of years ago.

Shelby paused to watch. The horse drew up at the home of Doctor
Stillwell, the dentist. Before the wagon was at rest the delivery-boy
was off and half-way around the side of the house. Mrs. Stillwell opened
the screen door to take in the carrots and soap and washing-powder
Shelby used to bring her. Shelby remembered that she used washing-powder
then. He wondered if she had heard of the "Paradise."

As he hung poised on a brink of memory the screen door flapped shut, the
grocery-boy was hurrying back, the horse was moving away, and the boy
leaped to his side-saddle seat on the wagon while it was in motion. The
delivery-wagons and their Jehus were the only things that moved fast in
Wakefield, now as then.

Shelby drifted back to the main street and found the Bon-Ton Grocery
where it had been when he deserted the wagon. The same old vegetables
seemed to be sprawling outside. The same flies were avid at the
strawberry-boxes, which, he felt sure, the grocer's wife had arranged as
always, with the biggest on top. He knew that some Mrs.