I went back there a year ago last
summer--why, pshaw! it wasn't anything at all. It was a dry summer,
I admit, but not as dry as all that. A poor, pitiful, provincial,
two-for-a cent--and yet... and yet... And yet I sat there after I had
dressed, and mused upon the former things--the life that was, but never
could be again; the Eden before whose gate was a flaming sword turning
every way. The night was still and moonless. The Milky Way slanted
across the dark dome above. It was far from the street lamps that
greened among the leafy maples in the silent streets. Gushes of air
stirred the fluttering sycamore, and whispered in the tall larches that
marched down the boundary line of the Blymire property. The last group
of swimmers had turned into the road from around the clump of willows at
the end of the pasture. The boy that is always the last one had nearly
caught up with the others, for the velvet pat of his bare feet in the
deep dust was slowing. Their eager chatter softened and softened, until
it blended with the sounds of night that verge on silence, the fall of a
leaf, the up-springing of a trodden tuft of grass, the sleepy twitter
of a dreaming bird, and the shrilling of locusts patiently turning a
creaking wheel. I heard the thump of hoofs and buggy wheels booming
in the covered bridge, and a shudder came upon me that was not all the
chill of falling dew. Again I was a little boy, standing in a circle of
my fellows and staring at something pale, stretched out upon the ground.
Ben Snyder had dived for It and found It and brought It up and laid It
on the long, clean grass. Some one had said we ought to get a barrel and
roll It on the barrel, but there was none there. And then some one
said: "No, it was against the law to touch anything like That before
the Coroner came." So, though we wished that something might be done,
we were glad the law stepped in and stringently forbade us touching what
our flesh crept to think of touching. No longer existed for us the boy
that had the spy-glass and the "Swiss Family Robinson." Something cold
and terrible had taken his place, something that could not see, and yet
looked upward with unwinking eyes. The gloom deepened, and the dew began
to fall. We could hear the boy that ran for the doctor whimpering a long
way off. We wanted to go home, and yet we dared not. Something might get
us. And we could not leave That alone in the dark with It's eyes wide
open. The locusts in the grass t