I was sure I wanted something I did not have, could never (having my father’s blood in me) achieve. Old houses in which long lives have been lived, in which men and women have lived, suffered and endured together--a people, my own people, come to a day when entire lives are lived in one place, a people who have come to love the streets of old towns, the mellow color of the stone walls of old houses. Did I want these things, even then? Being an American in a new land and facing a new time, did I want even what Europe must have meant in the hearts of many of the older men who had talked to the boy on the streets of an Ohio town? Was there something in me that, at the moment, went wandering back through the blood of my ancestors, through the blood of the ancestors of the men about me--to England, to Italy, Sweden, Russia, France, Germany--older places, older towns, older impulses? The new house, the farmer was having built, stood clear of the forest and directly faced the dirt road that led into town. It had instinctively run out to meet the coming automobile and the interurban car--and how blatantly it announced itself! “You see I am new, I cost money. I am big. I am bold,” it seemed to be saying. And looking at it I crouched for a moment against the wall of the barn, instinctively afraid. Was it because the new house was, for all its size, cheaply constructed and at bottom ugly? Could I have known that even as a boy? To make such a declaration would, I am sure, be giving myself an early critical instinct too much developed. It would be making something of a little monster of the boy crouching there in the darkness by the barn. All I can say is that I remember how the boy who, on that evening long ago, went slowly away from the barn through the mud of the barnyard, turned his back on the new house, and stopped for a moment on the bridge leading to the old house, sad and frightened. Before him lay a life of adventures (imagined if not actually experienced), but at the moment he went not toward the future but toward the past. In the older house there was, to be sure, a meal to be had without labor--in this case a meal prepared at the hands of a kindly faced woman--and there was also a warm bed into which the boy could crawl to indulge all night long undisturbed in his dreams; but there was something else. A sense of security? It may be, after all, just the sense of security, or assurance of warmth, food, and leisure--most of all leisure--the boy wanted on that evening, that, for some reason I cannot explain, marked the end of boyhood for him. BOOK TWO NOTE I