"Order, gentlemen! Order," rapped Pettibone, as the room rocked with the laughter in which Forshay led. When sobriety was restored it was moved, seconded, and passed that the secretary be instructed to send Shelby a copy of the boom number of the Wakefield _Daily Eagle_. And in due time the homesick Ulysses, waiting a welcome from Ithaca, received this answer to his letter: LUKE B. SHELBY, Springfield, Mass. SIR,--Yours of sixteenth inst. rec'd and contents noted. In reply to same, beg to state are sending last special number _Daily Eagle_, giving full information about city and sites. Yours truly, JOEL SPATE, _Secy. Exec. Comm._ Shelby winced. The hand he had held out with pearls of price had been brushed aside. His brothers laughed. "We said you were cracked. They don't want your old money or your society. Go somewheres where they do." But Luke B. Shelby had won his success by refusing to be denied, and he had set his heart on refurbishing his old home town. The instinct of place is stronger than any other instinct in some animals, and Shelby was homesick for Wakefield--not for anybody, any house, or any street in particular there, but just for Wakefield. Without further ado he packed his things and went. II There was no brass band to meet him. At the hotel the clerk read his name without emotion. When he required the best two rooms in the hotel, and a bath at that, the clerk looked suspicious: "Any baggage?" "Three trunks and a grip." "What line do you carry? Will you use the sample-room?" "Don't carry any line. Don't want any sample-room." He walked out to see the town. It had so much the same look that it seemed to have been embalmed. Here were the old stores, the old signs, apparently the same fly-specked wares in the windows. He read Doctor Barnby's rusty shingle. Wasn't that the same swaybacked horse dozing at the hitching-post? Here was the rough hill road where he used to coast as a child. There stood Mrs. Hooker on the lawn with a hose, sprinkling the street, the trees, the grass, the oleander in its tub and the moon-flower on the porch. He seemed to have left her twenty years ago in that attitude with the same arch of water springing from the nozzle. He paused before the same gap-toothed street-crossing of yore, and he started across it as across the stepping-stones of a dry stream. A raw-boned horse whirled around the corner, just avoiding his toes. It was followed by a bouncing grocery-wagon on the side of whose seat dangled a shirt-sleeved youth who might have been Shelby himself a score of years ago.