ld do but he must go to California. And here's Henry's
farm, but where Henry is nobody knows. Every time I see the yeller
wheat standin' in these fields, I think of how Henry's grandfather
begged him not to go. Henry was his favorite grandchild, and it broke
the old man's heart to see him leave. He took hold o' Henry's hand and
led him to the front door and says he,

"'Son, do you think the Lord was so forgetful of his children as to
put all the gold in the world out yonder in California?' Says he,
'That potato-patch over there is a gold-mine, and there's a gold-mine
in that wheat-field, and another one in the corn-field. And if you'll
go down in the orchard and gether a load o' them pippin apples and a
few punkins, and haul 'em to town and sell 'em, you'll find there's
some gold in them.' Says he, 'The whole earth's a gold-mine, if men
jest have the patience to dig it out.' But Henry would go, and I
reckon he couldn't help it, poor boy! Some folks are born to stay at
home, and some are born with the wanderin' fever in their bones."

I looked at the fertile fields that were the dead man's heritage, and
read again the old story of restless human ambition that loses the
near and the familiar by grasping at the far-off and unknown.

We were nearing the town limits now. Instead of the infrequent
farmhouses, we were passing rows of pretty suburban homes. Now and
then a fine old elm by the roadside, or within some neat, flowery
yard, spoke of the "forest primeval" vanishing before the stealthy
march of a growing town.

Aunt Jane's face wore the look of the pilgrim who approaches the City
Beautiful. She loved the country, and nature had kindly given her the
power to love one thing without hating its antithesis. But, apart from
Aunt Jane's company, going to town had no attraction for me, to whom a
town is only one of those necessary evils whose sum total we call
civilization. And while Aunt Jane took delighted notice of the
street-cars, the newly laid concrete walks, the sprinkling-cart, and
the automobile with its discordant warning voice, my heart turned back
regretfully to the narrow wayside path bordered by dusty weeds and
watered only by the dew and rain, to the old "dirt road," marked by
the track of the lazy ox-team or the two-horse wagon, and hushed and
bounded by the great silences of field and wood.

Aunt Jane was smiling and looking to right and left, and the children
on the street were quick to respond with ans