By the time the stork was settled on the Rector’s house and busy repairing his nest, our boyish eyes turned speculatively toward the swelling buds of the pear tree that hung temptingly over the narrow way to the Latin School, and we tried to estimate how many of them had pears in them, and what were the chances of their happening to hit us as they fell, later on. Our daily walk took the direction of the Castle Hill, and turned off at the big buckthorn hedge to the river where we swam in summer. The cowslips were in the meadows then, and forget-me-nots grew on the bank where the rushes nodded to the waters going out to the sea, as if they would like to go too, but, being unable, gave them a message of cheer and good luck on the way. And the spring birds called to each other in the meadows. Then the bright nights were at hand. They came, as night does in the hot countries, suddenly. You saw in the almanac--the 6th of May, I think it was--that they were due, and that night, or the next if it was clear, you noticed a something in the atmosphere that was different. You walked with a lighter step, and your glance strayed constantly to the west, where the light never quite went out, but kept moving round north, to hail the coming day in the east. And every morning it came earlier and left later, till St. John’s Day was passed, when the days again began to grow shorter. Then one night in early August, when we walked abroad on the causeway, we knew that the summer was soon over. The light had gone out of the sky, as suddenly as it came, and the world was changed. There lives in my memory such an evening in after years. I had been home--for ever the Old Town remained home to one whose cradle was rocked there--and was going my farewell rounds among the old people and the old places before packing off with the stork and his family. My way took me past the Castle Hill in the early twilight. A man stood up there, a lonely figure sharply outlined against the light that was fading out of the western sky. He stood watching it as if he would hold it fast if he could, never stirring once while the warm pink changed to a steely gray, cold as the moonlight on Arctic ice. Behind him the town lay buried in its shadows. I almost fancied I saw him shiver as they crept up the hill to close him in their long night. I knew him, a schoolmate of mine, a man in good position who had remained unmarried and was now past middle age, always a lonesome sort of fellow. He stood there yet when the houses shut him out of my sight, and I did not see him again. Three days later, on the day we sailed from Copenhagen, I heard that he was dead. He had killed himself, no one knew why. He was comfortable as the world goes, and there was no explanation of his act, they said. To me none was needed. The picture of him, standing there alone, the twilight of summer and of life closing in upon him, rose up before me, and I thought I understood.