m 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 knowing what to say. My boy had on
his best clothes, which he wore so as to affect the Boy's Town boys with
the full splendor of a city boy. After all, he was not so very splendid,
but his presence altogether was too much for the earth-spirit, and he
vanished out of his consciousness like an apparition.

After school was out in the afternoon, he met more of the boys, but none
of them knew just what to do with him. The place that he had once had in
their lives was filled; he was an outsider, who might be suffered among
them, but he was no longer of them. He did not understand this at once,
nor well know what hurt him. But something was gone that could not be
called back, something lost that could not be found.

At tea-time his grandfather came home and gravely made him welcome; the
uncle who was staying with them was jovially kind. But a heavy
homesickness weighed down the child's heart, which now turned from the
Boy's Town as longingly as it had turned towards it before.

They all knelt down with the grandfather before they went to the table.
There had been a good many deaths from cholera during the day, and the
grandfather prayed for grace and help amidst the pestilence that walketh
in darkness and wasteth at noonday in such a way that the boy felt there
would be very little of either for him unless he got home at once. All
through the meal that followed he was trying to find the courage to say
that he must go home. When he managed to say it, his grandmother and
aunt tried to comfort and coax him, and his uncle tried to shame him,
out of his homesickness, to joke it off, to make him laugh. But his
grandfather's tender heart was moved. He could not endure the child's
mute misery; he said he must go home if he wished.

In half an hour the boy was on the canal-packet speeding homeward at the
highest pace of the three-horse team, and the Boy's Town was out of
sight. He could not sleep for excitement that night, and h