er weakness and trustfulness, which had been
a continual delight. I could no longer see her eyes nor touch her hands,
nor sit silent at her feet, dreaming of days to come. Her voice was gone
from my listening ears. Always I waited to hear her footstep, but it
came no longer, rustling in the grasses. It seemed to me that by some
hard decree I had been deprived of all my senses; for not one was left
which did not crave and cry aloud for her.

It was thus that I, dulled, bereft; I, having lived, now dead; I, late
free, now bound again, turned away sullenly, and began my journey back
to the life I had known before I met her.

As I passed East by the Denver stage, I met hurrying throngs always
coming westward, a wavelike migration of population now even denser than
it had been the preceding spring. It was as Colonel Meriwether said, the
wagons almost touched from the Platte to the Rockies. They came on, a
vast, continuous stream of hope, confidence and youth. I, who stemmed
that current, alone was unlike it in all ways.

One thing only quickened my laggard heart, and that was the all
prevalent talk of war. The debates of Lincoln and Douglas, the
consequences of Lincoln's possible election, the growing dissensions in
the Army over Buchanan's practically overt acts of war--these made the
sole topics of conversation. I heard my own section, my own State,
criticised bitterly, and all Southerners called traitors to that flag I
had seen flying over the frontiers of the West. At times, I say, these
things caused my blood to stir once more, though perhaps it was not all
through patriotism.

At last, after weeks of travel across a disturbed country, I finally
reached the angry hive of political dissension at Washington. Here I was
near home, but did not tarry, and passed thence by stage to Leesburg, in
Virginia; and so finally came back into our little valley and the quiet
town of Wallingford. I had gone away the victim of misfortune; I
returned home with a broken word and an unfinished promise and a shaken
heart. That was my return.

I got me a horse at Wallingford barns, and rode out to Cowles' Farms. At
the gate I halted and looked in over the wide lawns. It seemed to me I
noted a change in them as in myself. The grass was unkempt, the flower
beds showed little attention. The very seats upon the distant gallery
seemed unfamiliar, as though arranged by some careless hand. I opened
the gate for myself, rode up to the old stoop