Fremont was a town of bewildering experiences. It was filled with fantastic excitement--Indian alarms, the coming and going of prairie schooners, visits of parties of Cheyenne and Sioux chiefs, gun fights beyond the hills and reports of Indian massacres on the Niobrara. Against all this the simple village life of the Swedes and Danes looked like that of quaint foreigners. Yet there were tragedies among Gutzon’s own people--sickness and death and evil times, thin crops and blizzards, high winds and floods. There was a brief school life at home, then school life at a distance. Each year when the boy returned he would find that some of his Fremont had vanished. Not exactly _vanished_, he felt; rather, the town had grown and he had grown, and somehow they had parted. The doctor moved his family after years of this to Omaha. There didn’t seem to be much difference. He had been gone a long time--or so it seemed to him--when he was eighteen years old. The thought came to him that he must see his old playground and playmates, swim in the old Rawhide, go graping or be once more with the boys and girls with whom he had grown up. He bought a train ticket for Fremont and long remembered how he could hardly wait to reach the town. The train slowed down at the platform and he was off before it stopped. He looked at the crowd of strangers pressing about, and tried to catch a glimpse of a familiar face. At last he found a few ... but very few. He went into town and to the homes of friends. He found the girls he had known. Their hair was piled high on top of their heads; their dresses were long, their manners awkward. The boys stared at him and didn’t say anything. He couldn’t tell what had happened to these people, and, he realized later, they were puzzled in the same way about him. All of them had grown. There was no longer any school from which to play hooky, no occasion to hang one’s clothes on a cottonwood and dive into mud from an old stump. Gutzon was now a stranger to all that. And, though he refused to see it, so were these close friends of a few years ago. None of them could understand. He wrote: I turned like one frightened and hurt and brokenhearted and ran back to the station. There on the platform I sat for hours waiting for any train to get away from Fremont. No--away from the reality that had blotted out my magic world, the world that a boy of from six to twelve lives in. And I have never had the courage to return.