he _was_ afraid to die; and
she could only turn from reconciling him with the other world to
assuring him that he was in no danger of leaving this.

I sometimes think that if parents would deal rightly and truly with
children about death from the beginning, some of the fear of it might be
taken away. It seems to me that it is partly because death is hushed up
and ignored between them that it rests such a burden on the soul; but if
children were told as soon as they are old enough that death is a part
of nature, and not a calamitous accident, they would be somewhat
strengthened to meet it. My boy had been taught that this world was only
an illusion, a shadow thrown from the real world beyond; and no doubt
his father and mother believed what they taught him; but he had always
seen them anxious to keep the illusion, and in his turn he clung to the
vain shadow with all the force of his being.

He got well of the cholera, but not of the homesickness, and 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 afterwards 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 fro