It was a beautiful summer evening. I glanced hungrily from the windows at every familiar sight--it all seemed so real, yet so incredible--here were the old scenes just as I had known them, unchanged, when so much had been happening to me! “Unchanged?” But there was a change, a glamour over everything, a light that never had been, and never could be again--the light in which one sees a dear, familiar scene on returning to it after his first absence! When we got to the “corner”--the top of the hill that leads down to our house--I climbed out and ran ahead to surprise them before they should hear the stage-bells. I can see myself now, flying down the hill in the June twilight, and running up the steps into Mother’s arms, almost before she knew who it was. Home again, among the four beings I loved best in all the world! If one wants to know how much he loves home and family, let him go away in his youth to a distant city for long months, then let him come back to that shelter and learn to the full the blessedness, the sacred joy of all that is comprised in that word “Home”! How late we talked that night! Neighbours and friends flocked in to see the wanderer; how good they all looked! but how odd their voices sounded--every _r_ in their words stood out with such distinctness, after hearing the broad _a_’s and the softened _r_’s of the New England pronunciation. I spoke of the peculiarities of the New England speech; how funny it had seemed to hear the College professors speak of idea_r_s; how the chemistry professor talked of soda_r_ ash, and, unless she was very careful, the Maine elocutionist called her room-mate “Anna_r_”; of how affected it seemed to omit their _r_’s in words where they should be, and insert them where they did not belong. I said I had noticed a decided difference in Belle’s speech, although she had ridiculed it as much as I did when we went there. While I was speaking of this, a smile went round the family circle, finally they laughed outright. “What are you all laughing at?” I asked, a bit nettled. They said they guessed Belle was not the only one who had taken on the Boston pronunciation. “Do you mean me?” I asked incredulously. “We certainly do.” They had been amused ever since I had arrived to note the change in my speech.