The last time I went to Farmington I drove past the house. Ferman Henry sat upon the little bench under the big oak-tree. A pail of water, with a dipper in it, stood by the pump. Mrs. Henry came out to see if I had grown. A group of children were grubbing dirt in the front yard. I drew up for a moment under the old tree, in the spot where I had so often rested when a child. Ferman Henry seemed little changed. The years had slipped over him like days or weeks, and scarcely left a furrow on his face or whitened a single hair. At my questioning surprise, he told me that the small children in the yard belonged to his sons who lived upstairs. I looked at the house, now falling to decay. The roof was badly patched, the weather-boards were loose; the porch had not been finished, and the building had never seen a coat of paint. I asked after his health and prosperity. He told me that all the family were well, and that he was getting on all right, and expected to finish his house that fall and paint it in the spring. Out in the back yard I heard the hogs grunting in the pen, as in the old-time days. I saw the laughing children playing in the dirt. Mrs. Henry stood on the porch outside, and Ferman sat on the old bench and smiled benignly on me as I drove away. Then I fell to musing as to who was the wiser,—he or I. CHAPTER XXI AUNT LOUISA If I had only known, when I opened the long-closed door of the past, how fondly I should linger around the old familiar haunts, I am sure that I never should have taken a look back. I intended only to set down the few events that connect me with to-day. I did not know that the child was alien to the man, and that the world in which he lived was not the gray old world I know, but a bright green spot where the sun shone and the birds sang all day long, and the passing cloud left its shower only to make the landscape fairer and brighter than before. And here, once more, while all reluctantly I was about to turn the bolt on that other world, comes a long-forgotten scene, and a host of memories that clamor for a place in the pages of my book. I cannot imagine why they come, or what relation they bear to the important events of a living world. I had thought them as dead as the tenants of the oldest and most forgotten grave that had long since lost its headstone and was only a sunken spot in the old churchyard.