The last time I was in Farmington I once more went inside the old graveyard; somehow it had a nearer and more personal meaning to me than it ever had before. In those far-off days the churchyard was only a casual thought that flitted now and then like a shadow through my mind,—never with much personal relation to myself, but more in connection with my father or mother, or with some old neighbor whom I knew and loved; but I find that more and more, as we grow older, the thought of churchyards becomes familiar to our lives and brings a personal meaning of which childhood cannot know. Farmington itself, when I last saw it, had not much changed except to grow older and more deserted than when I was young. Some of the shops and stores were vacant, and many of the people had gone to more prosperous towns; but the churchyard had grown larger with the passing years. The old part was well-nigh forgotten, but the new yard had stretched out until it quite covered the field where we used to chase the ball, and had then slowly crept off over a ravine farther back, and was climbing on up the hill. I wandered for a while around the winding paths, and read again the inscriptions on the leaning stones; these had a meaning that I never felt before. When I read the ages of the dead, I found many a stone that told of fewer years than those that I could boast, and in the newer part I spelled out the names of some of those little white-haired boys that once skipped along the winding path with me without the slightest thought that they so soon would be sleeping with the rest. CHAPTER XII CHILDHOOD SURROUNDINGS The life of the child is not the life of the man, and the town of the child is not the town of the man. I can never see Farmington except through my boyhood’s eyes, and no doubt the town and its people were not at all the same to the men and the women that they were to me. Every object meant one thing to them and quite a different thing to our childish minds. As I grew to boyhood, the mill-pond was only a place where I could fish and skate and swim, and the great turning wheel served only to divert my wondering eyes and ears as it kept up its noisy rounds. The old mill furnished us boys a place to hide and run and play our games. The whole scheme of things was ours, and was utilized by a boy’s varying needs to help fill up his life. To the kind old miller the condition of the water in the pond was doubtless quite another thing, and every revolution of the groaning wheel must have meant bread to him,—not only bread for the customers whose grain he ground, but sorely needed bread for the hungry mouths of those who had no thought or care whence or how it came, but only unbounded faith that it would always be ready to satisfy their needs.