He had found an old road which he used to travel when a boy--a road that skirted the edge of the valley, now grown up to brush, but still passable for footmen. As he ran lightly along down the beautiful path, under oaks and hickories, past masses of poison-ivy, under hanging grapevines, through clumps of splendid hazel-nut bushes loaded with great sticky, rough, green burs, his heart threw off part of its load. How it all came back to him! How many days, when the autumn sun burned the frost of the bushes, had he gathered hazel-nuts here with his boy and girl friends--Hugh and Shelley McTurg, Rome Sawyer, Orrin McIlvaine, and the rest! What had become of them all? How he had forgotten them! This thought stopped him again, and he fell into a deep muse, leaning against an oak tree, and gazing into the vast fleckless space above. The thrilling, inscrutable mystery of life fell upon him like a blinding light. Why was he living in the crush and thunder and mental unrest of a great city, while his companions, seemingly his equals in powers, were milking cows, making butter, and growing corn and wheat in the silence and drear monotony of the farm? His boyish sweethearts! their names came back to his ear now, with a dull, sweet sound as of faint bells. He saw their faces, their pink sunbonnets tipped back upon their necks, their brown ankles flying with the swift action of the scurrying partridge. His eyes softened, he took off his hat. The sound of the wind and the leaves moved him almost to tears. A woodpecker gave a shrill, high-keyed, sustained cry, "Ki, ki, ki!" and he started from his revery, the dapples of the sun and shade falling upon his lithe figure as he hurried on down the path. He came at last to a field of corn that ran to the very wall of a large weather-beaten house, the sight of which made his breathing quicker. It was the place where he was born. The mystery of his life began there. In the branches of those poplar and hickory trees he had swung and sung in the rushing breeze, fearless as a squirrel. Here was the brook where, like a larger kildee, he with Grant had waded after crawfish, or had stolen upon some wary trout, rough-cut pole in hand. Seeing someone in the garden, he went down along the corn-row through the rustling ranks of green leaves. An old woman was picking berries, a squat and shapeless figure. "Good-morning," he called cheerily. "Morgen," she said, looking up at him with a startled and very red face. She was German in every line of her body. "Ich bin Herr McLane," he said, after a pause. "So?" she replied, with a questioning inflection. "Yah; ich bin Herr Grant's Bruder." "Ach, so!" she said, with a downward inflection. "Ich no spick Inglish. No spick Inglis." "Ich bin durstig," he said. Leaving her pans, she went with him to the house, which was what he really wanted to see. "Ich bin hier geboren."