nexpressibly strong to go and seek it--if there were still a nest in a
little hollow I knew of, where in my time I had watched scores of
yellow-beaked nestlings.

I went past the house where my mother and I had lived so many years. It
was so changed I should not have recognized it, repainted and modernized
with much show of glass and bow-windows. There were few people to be
seen along the white walks until I met the stream from the post-office.
Old men and boys, shy girls and children, came out with their letters
and papers just as in the old time. Some of the men, grown corpulent and
gray, I recognized with the old feeling of reverence and love, and
stopped to speak with them. But Belfield life, slow and stagnant though
it was, was busy enough to have filled their minds with fresher
memories, and I was so nearly forgotten that there was small pleasure in
reminding them of the lad who had grown from babyhood into a tall
stripling among them. My sentiment passed. I looked about more coldly
even at the street that led to the cottage where Georgy Lenox lived, and
went on briskly to the great stone house of the Holts. Georgy would be
there of course: impossible that another Easter could have passed
without her being a bride. I wondered as I entered the open iron gate
what she would say to me.

The place had seemed splendid to me as a boy, and I well remembered how
all the beautiful wonders of the spring blossomed here as nowhere else.
But now these grounds too seemed to have suffered a change: there was an
air of neglect about the unpruned hedges, with straggling blossoms
running riotously over fence and shrubbery; the beds of hyacinths and
tulips were trampled, and as I neared the house I saw that the blinds
swung carelessly and the old look of thrift and prosperity was quite
absent. Still, I observed all this dreamily, wondering, as returned
travellers are apt to do, if the change were in the things themselves or
in my own eyes.

"Perhaps," thought I, "Jack and his wife live in New York," when,
suddenly answering my doubt, Jack himself came down the avenue in his
light wagon.

I stepped aside, standing still, and he regarded me at first absently,
then with startled curiosity, and sharply drew his skittish mare back on
her haunches. "Good God, Floyd!" said he, "how glad I am to see you!" We
looked straight in each other's face for a time, and his features
worked, as he regarded me, with some emotion. "You were going to