My health had failed at last through constant work, long hours, insufficient and irregular diet, and my nerves paid the penalty for thus transgressing nature’s laws. Every sin brings its own punishment, whether it be mental, moral, or physical; it may be that payment is not exacted to-day, or to-morrow, but sooner or later the penalty will surely follow the sin. I was in fact mentally, as well as bodily exhausted; I had reached the very depths of disgust; nothing seemed worth doing, everything was useless; work was worse than useless, a foolishness; pleasure—nothing was a pleasure. Like one of old I cried out: “All is vanity and vexation of spirit.” I went into the country; not to a distant railway station, to become one of a dissatisfied mob at a crowded summer hotel, but into the very heart of the green hills, where the limpid streams gurgled for very joy, as they frolicked on their way to the distant river; where the woods were so dense that the sun could only play hide and seek with the softly fluttering leaves, once in a while touching the soft mossy carpet, or the glossy leaves of the scarlet checkerberries lovingly. Here I found the dearest, quaintest old houses with pointed gables under which the noisy swallows built their nests of mud—a house with small, many-paned windows, and great, yawning fireplaces. The simple-hearted old people who owned the place welcomed me with unaffected curiosity. I dawdled in the evenings in the sitting room with grandpa and grandma Yoeman, with no light save the flickering blaze of the hickory logs; idly watching the pictures in the glowing coals, and dreaming strange sweet dreams, which ever held a reflection of entrancing sadness. The fitful blaze cast strange lights and shadows on the low ceiling; glinting on grandma’s busy knitting needles; brightening and fading like an uncertain life. Occasionally one of the neighbors came in to exchange news about the planting; to borrow or “swap” garden seeds; to speculate on the weather; the greater reason being to see the city boarder. Sometimes their frank inquisitiveness amused, at other times it annoyed me. I had been there a month; the weather had grown too warm to permit a fire in the evening, and the sitting room looked dismal with its one small kerosene lamp, around which the moths fluttered, and singed their foolish wings, nearly obscuring the light. “Drat the things,” said grandma, from time to time. Heavy clouds lay low in the west, and the occasional low growling of thunder indicated the coming of a storm; the breeze scarcely lifted the muslin curtain at the window. A rush of homesickness came over me; the gloom depressed me, and left me wretched; the sultry atmosphere seemed unbearable; the quaint, low-ceiled rooms seemed suffocating, and detestably ugly, and I wondered that I could have thought them so charming.