Best of all he loved the horses. Most of these were old and had given faithful service for many years. Indeed, there was one--Old Badge--that had carried Kurt when he was a boy. Once he and a neighbor boy had gone to the pasture to fetch home the cows. Old Badge was there, and nothing would do but that they ride him. From the fence Kurt mounted to his broad back. Then the neighbor boy, full of the devil, had struck Old Badge with a stick. The horse set off at a gallop for home with Kurt, frantically holding on, bouncing up and down on his back. That had been the ride of Kurt's life. His father had whipped him, too, for the adventure. How strangely vivid and thought-compelling were these ordinary adjuncts to his life there on the farm. It was only upon giving them up that he discovered their real meaning. The hills of bare fallow and of yellow slope, the old barn with its horses, swallows, mice, and odorous loft, the cows and chickens--these appeared to Kurt, in the illuminating light of farewell, in their true relation to him. For they, and the labor of them, had made him what he was. Slowly he went back to the old house and climbed the stairs. Only three rooms were there up-stairs, and one of these, his mother's, had not been opened for a long time. It seemed just the same as when he used to go to her with his stubbed toes and his troubles. She had died in that room. And now he was a man, going out to fight for his country. How strange! Why? In his mother's room he could not answer that puzzling question. It stung him, and with a last look, a good-by, and a word of prayer on his lips, he turned to his own little room. He entered and sat down on the bed. It was small, with the slope of the roof running down so low that he had learned to stoop when close to the wall. There was no ceiling. Bare yellow rafters and dark old shingles showed. He could see light through more than one little hole. The window was small, low, and without glass. How many times he had sat there, leaning out in the hot dusk of summer nights, dreaming dreams that were never to come true. Alas for the hopes and illusions of boyhood! So long as he could remember, this room was most closely associated with his actions and his thoughts. It was a part of him. He almost took it into his confidence as if it were human. Never had he become what he had dared to dream he would, yet, somehow, at that moment he was not ashamed. It struck him then what few belongings he really had. But he had been taught to get along with little.