ths and
deaths. Meanwhile, the friends who had held fast to me through all
these changes wrote ever in the selfsame vein, and plotted for my
return with such even and sturdy faith that I had grown to look upon
them as having drunk at the fountain of immortal youth.

Of course the delectable spring gushed out of the heart of one of
those dear old hills that walled in the village, for how else could
they have quaffed it? The bones of more than two centuries pave the
highway between New England and California. As jubilant as young
Lochinvar, I came out of the West one summer dawn, and took train for
Heartsease. I had resolved to compass in a single week the innumerable
landmarks that dot mountain and desert and prairie--to leap as it were
from sea to sea, from the present to the past, from manhood to early
youth.

Is it any wonder that I forestalled the time, and was a day and a
night distant before inquiring friends discovered my flight? Is it any
wonder that the shrieking and swaying train seemed slow to me, for
already my spirit had folded its swift wings in the nest-like village
of Heartsease? I had, moreover, by this brilliant manoeuvre, left the
bitter cup of parting untasted--but nothing more serious than
this--and seemed to have won a whole day from the clutches of Time,
who deals them out so stingily to the expectant and impatient watcher.

San Francisco faces the sunrise, but there is a broad glittering bay
and a coast range with brawny bare shoulders between them: I sailed
over the flashing water, rode under the mountains and threaded three
tunnels before I began to realize that I was a fugitive from home. It
was midsummer; the car-windows were half open; whiffs of warm wind
blew in upon me scented with bay-leaves and sage. For a moment I
forgot Heartsease and the home of my youth, and turned tenderly to
take a last farewell of the beloved land of my adoption. The corn was
cut and stacked in long dusty rows: it looked like a deserted camp;
the grain was down; small squirrels skipped lightly over the shining
stubble, whisking their bushy tails like puffs of smoke. It seemed to
me that no fairer land ever baked in summer's sunshine. Even the
parched earth, with its broken and powdered crust, was lovely in my
eyes. Small day-owls sat in the corners of the fences, when there were
any fences to sit in, and nodded to me from behind their feather
masks: all the birds of the air taunted me with heads on one side and