glen where he had been born.

So he had come back to it, drawn by a longing not to be resisted. But
at the last he felt afraid. There had been many changes, of that he
felt sure. Would it still be home? And if not, would not the loss be
most irreparable and bitter? Would it not be better to go away, having
looked at it from the hill and having heard the saga of the firs,
keeping his memory of it unblurred, than risk the probable disillusion
of a return to the places that had forgotten him and friends whom the
varying years must certainly have changed as he had changed himself?
No, he would not go down. It had been a foolish whim to come at
all--foolish, because the object of his quest was not to be found
there or elsewhere. He could not enter again into the heritage of
boyhood and the heart of youth. He could not find there the old dreams
and hopes that had made life sweet. He understood that he could not
bring back to the old valley what he had taken from it. He had lost
that intangible, all-real wealth of faith and idealism and zest; he
had bartered it away for the hard, yellow gold of the marketplace, and
he realized at last how much poorer he was than when he had left that
home valley. His was a name that stood for millions, but he was
beggared of hope and purpose.

No, he would not go down. There was no one left there, unchanged and
unchanging, to welcome him. He would be a stranger there, even among
his kin. He would stay awhile on the hill, until the night came down
over it, and then he would go back to his own place.

Down below him, on the crest of a little upland, he saw his old home,
a weather-grey house, almost hidden among white birch and apple trees,
with a thick fir grove to the north of it. He had been born in that
old house; his earliest memory was of standing on its threshold and
looking afar up to the long green hills.

"What is over the hills?" he had asked of his mother. With a smile she
had made answer,

"Many things, laddie. Wonderful things, beautiful things,
heart-breaking things."

"Some day I shall go over the hills and find them all, Mother," he had
said stoutly.

She had laughed and sighed and caught him to her heart. He had no
recollection of his father, who had died soon after his son's birth,
but how well he remembered his mother, his little, brown-eyed,
girlish-faced mother!

He had lived on the homestead until he was twenty. He had tilled the
broad fields and gone in and out