there, and all the manifold privileges of the place. Then he
began to be very homesick, and to be torn with the torment of a divided
love. His mother, whom he loved so dearly, so tenderly, was here, and
wherever she was, that was home; and yet home was yonder, far off, at
the end of those forty inexorable miles, where he had left his life-long
mates. The first months there was a dumb heartache at the bottom of
every pleasure and excitement.

After a while he was allowed to revisit the Boy's Town. It could only
have been three or four months after he had left it, but it already
seemed a very long time; and he figured himself returning as stage
heroes do to the scenes of their childhood, after an absence of some
fifteen years. He fancied that if the boys did not find him grown, they
would find him somehow changed, and that he would dazzle them with the
light accumulated by his residence in a city. He was going to stay with
his grandmother, and he planned to make a long stay; for he was very
fond of her, and he liked the quiet and comfort of her pleasant house.
He must have gone back by the canal-packet, but his memory kept no
record of the fact, and afterward he knew only of having arrived, and of
searching about in a ghostly fashion for his old comrades. They may have
been at school; at any rate, he found very few of them; and with them he
was certainly strange enough; too strange, even. They received him with
a kind of surprise; and they could not begin playing together at once in
the old way. He went to all the places that were so dear to him; but he
felt in them the same kind of refusal, or reluctance, that he felt in
the boys. His heart began to ache again, he did not quite know why;
only it ached. When he went up from his grandmother's to look at the
Faulkner house, he realized that it was no longer home, and he could not
bear the sight of it. There were other people living in it; strange
voices sounded from the open doors, strange faces peered from the
windows.

He came back to his grandmother's, bruised and defeated, and spent the
morning indoors reading. After dinner he went out again, and hunted up
that queer earth-spirit who had been so long and closely his only
friend. He at least was not changed; he was as unwashed and as unkempt
as ever; but he seemed shy of my poor boy. He had probably never been
shaken hands with in his life before; he dropped my boy's hand; and they
stood looking at each other, not knowi