He turned and looked back, his eyes following the course of the little
stream. It wound past his old cabin, lost itself in the green
wilderness of the Drowned Lands, and passed on again through the open
fields to that rose-colored line on the horizon, where Lake Simcoe
smiled responsive to the glow of the western heavens. He gazed at it
earnestly, and was struck with the strange feeling that he had seen it
all before, long ago. The slow music of a bell from a cow feeding far
down the corduroy road echoed musically up the wooded aisle. Far off
in a clover meadow a clear "cling-cling" floated up, where young Donald
McKitterick stood sharpening his scythe. Some subtle influence seemed
to have transported him into the past. He looked at the darkening
purple of the woods, on one side, and at the sunny undulations of the
fields on the other, and the feeling of familiarity grew stronger.
This strange spirit of peace, this sense of tender associations, what
was causing it? Then a little breeze, laden with the clean scent of
running water, came dancing through the long grass, and all at once
John McIntyre understood. In his blindness, he had not noticed it
before--it was his old home come back to him! Here at his side ran the
river that passed his farm, there was the strip of woodland; and
yonder, on the horizon, not Lake Simcoe, but the dazzling stretches of
the Bay of Fundy! And how wondrously like it all was, this evening, to
that last peaceful night he remembered so well, just before the shadows
of distress had begun to gather.

Over there, to the west, the sun was slipping down to the earth, a
great fiery ball dropping from an empty sky. It touched the earth, and
kindled the fields to a glory of color; the woods took on a deeper
purple tone, and the little river ran into its depths, a stream of
molten gold. Just at John McIntyre's feet it passed through a bronze
fretwork of reeds, and above it the swallows wheeled, flashing, up and
up into the amber light.

The man stood, with a rising mist in his eyes obscuring the dear
familiarity of the scene. Yes, he was home again truly; and up there
beyond the glowing heavens, safer and happier than they had ever been
in the home nest among the orchards; they waited for him, Mary and
their little ones.

And still he stood, waiting, in the long, scented June grass, with a
feeling of further expectancy. This was home truly, but there was
something wanting--some subtle