Jepson felt a sudden poignant pang when first he caught sight of the crystal depths, of the little gray cabin, of the weed-grown wastes about it, and of the mountains opposite and those that clustered round. Ah, what does an old home house! Such troops of memories, gay and grave; such palpable fancies arrayed in the guise of those that once it knew, endowed with voices that speak no more,—morning, noon, and night, these tenants flit in and out of its portals and busy themselves as of yore, despite whomsoever it shelters now, and find no lack of space. Hospitable roof-tree! He could not enter at first; he did not even have the heart to meditate on the policy of its desertion and of his return. He unsaddled his mare, and watched the cattle take their way to the old pasture and into the tumbling shanty of a barn, noting indications of their dumb recognition of the locality. He wondered if they were aware of the change, and how in their dull and half-developed reasoning processes they accounted for it. Old griefs, seared over by time and distance, began to ache again in conscious bereavement. It smote him like a blow in the face to note the weed-grown spaces of the garden,—how bravely the prince’s-feathers flaunted, how the tiger-lilies flared! All of the utilitarian growths had succumbed; there might be “volunteer potatoes,” perchance, under the fennel, and the broad-leafed mullein, and the long tangled crab-grass, but naught showed of the old-time grace and plenty but the flowers that his mother had planted, still keeping tryst with the seasons as of yore. “How she did love ennything ez hed a strong color onto it!” he thought wistfully, remembering this primitive half-realized relish of beauty of contour and of tint, and watching a row of tall hollyhocks, all their straight, shaft-like stalks studded with blossoms as they waved back and forth in the wind, by the doorstep, where she used to sit and watch them, while she listened to the deep, musical flow of the stream in the abyss below, or the blare of the wind in the pines, or the heart-felt lay of a bird singing from the orchard bough. “Waal, waal,” he sighed as he lay at length amongst the clover, his hat upon the ground and his hands clasped under his head, gazing at the little gray cabin, “she hev got a better house ’n that one now,—a house not made with hands.” For all his imagination he could not see it, and so he sighed again.