d again, with a sigh of old days ended.

"You _can't_ get any closer," I admonished.

"_Here!_" she whispered insistingly, so that I felt the breath of it.

CHAPTER XXX

BY ANOTHER HAND

A wanderer from Little Arcady in early days returned to its placid
shades after many years, drawn thither by a little quick-born yearning
to walk the old streets again. But he found such strangeness in these
that his memory was put to prodigious feats of reconstruction ere it
could make them seemly as of yore.

To the west, away from the river, the town has groped beyond a prairie
frontier that had once been sacred to boyish games and the family cow.
Now, so thickly was it built with neat white houses, that only with
strenuous clairvoyance could famous old localities be identified: the
ball-ground; the marshy stretch that made skating in winter, or, in
spring, a fascinating place to catch cold by wading; the grassy common
where "shinny" was played by day and "Yellow Horn" by night; the
enchanted spot where the circus built airy castles of canvas, and where,
on the day after, one might plant one's feet squarely in the magic ring,
on the veritable spot, perchance, where the clown had superhumanly
ridden the difficult trick-mule after local volunteers had failed so
entertainingly.

Barns in this once wild country had failed amazingly. Only one of any
character was left, and it had shrunk. Of old a structure of
possibilities intensely romantic, it was now dingy, pitiable,
insignificant. No reasonable person would consider holding a circus
there--admission ten pins for boys and five pins for girls.

Orchards, too, had suffered. Acres of them, once known to their last
tree, including the safest routes of approach by day or night, had been
cut down to make space for substantial but unexciting houses, quite like
the houses in anybody's town. Other orchards had shrunk to a few poor
unproductive trees so little prized by their owners that they could no
longer excite evil thoughts in the young.

Indeed, almost everything had shrunk. The church steeples, once of an
inconceivable height, were now but a scant sixty feet; and the buildings
beneath them, that once had vied with old-world cathedrals, were seen to
be but toy churches.

Especially had gardens shrunk. One that boasted the widest area in days
when it must be hoed for the advantage of potatoes insanely planted
there, was now a plot so tiny that the returned wanderer, amaz