e, and the scar of mental pain
endured has not yet been stamped upon his good-humored expression. Yet
he is far from showing the light-hearted carelessness usually
belonging to his age and the easy-going manners that are so frequently
habitual with the traveling journeyman. The high road still leads him
through the dense woods; but from the town, far down below, the sound
of St. George's bells rises up to the height, as impossible to
restrain as a mother flying to the loved child that comes toward her.
Home! How much lies in this one short syllable! What swells within the
human heart when the voice of home, the tone of the bells, calls a
welcome to him who is returning from abroad, the tone that called the
child to church, the boy to his confirmation and his first communion,
that spoke to him every hour! In the idea of home, all our good angels
embrace one another.

Tears gathered in our young wanderer's serious and yet kindly eyes. If
he had not been ashamed he would have sobbed aloud. He felt as if he
had only dreamed his sojourn away from home and, now that he was
awake, could scarcely remember the dream; as if he had only dreamed
that he had grown to be a man while abroad; as if it had always seemed
to him in his dreams that he was only dreaming abroad in order, when
he should wake up at home, to be able to tell about it. It might have
been noticed that, in spite of all this inward agitation of the
moment, he did not fail to see the cobweb that the breeze from home
laid as a greeting against his coat collar, and that he carefully
dried his tears so that they might not fall on his neckerchief, and
that he removed the last, tiniest scraps of the silver thread with the
most persistent patience before he gave himself up to his feeling for
home with his whole soul. And even his attachment to his home was in
part only an expression of his obstinate need of cleanliness which
made him regard everything alien that threatened to fly against him as
dirt; and this need in turn sprang from the warmth of feeling with
which he embraced everything that stood in closer relation to his
personality. The clothes on his body were a piece of home to him, from
which he must ward off everything strange.

Now the road turned; the mountain ridge which had closed it in up to
this point was now left behind to one side and the top of a spire
appeared above the young growth. It was the top of St. George's
steeple. The young wanderer paused. Na