oke
from the mills was fatal to trees of the larger sort, and even these
had the look of doomed things--bent a little toward the town and
seemed to wait with head inclined before that on-coming, shrieking
force.

"About the river, too, there was a strange hush, a tragic
submission--it was so leaden and sullen in its color, and it flowed
so soundlessly forever past our door.

"I sat there every evening, on the high veranda overlooking it,
watching the dim outlines of the steep hills on the other shore, the
flicker of the lights on the island, where there was a boat-house,
and listening to the call of the boatmen through the mist. The mist
came as certainly as night, whitened by moonshine or starshine. The
tin water-pipes went splash, splash, with it all evening, and the
wind, when it rose at all, was little more than a sighing of the old
boughs and a troubled breath in the heavy grasses.

"At first it was to think of my distant friends and my old life that
I used to sit there; but after awhile it was simply to watch the
days and weeks go by, like the river which seemed to carry them
away.

"Within the house I was never at home. Month followed month, and yet
I could feel no sense of kinship with anything there. Under the roof
where my father and grandfather were born, I remained utterly
detached. The somber rooms never spoke to me, the old furniture
never seemed tinctured with race. This portrait of my boy uncle was
the only thing to which I could draw near, the only link with
anything I had ever known before.

"There is a good deal of my father in the face, but it is my father
transformed and glorified; his hesitating discontent drowned in a
kind of triumph. From my first day in that house, I continually
turned to this handsome kinsman of mine, wondering in what terms he
had lived and had his hope; what he had found there to look like
that, to bound at one, after all those years, so joyously out of the
canvas.

"From the timid, clouded old woman over whose life I had come to
watch, I learned that in the backyard, near the old rose garden,
there was a locust-tree which my uncle had planted. After his death,
while it was still a slender sapling, his mother had a seat built
round it, and she used to sit there on summer evenings. His grave
was under the apple-trees in the old orchard.

"My aunt could tell me little more than this. There were days when
she seemed not to remember him at all.

"It was from an old s