When RoBards woke he would often find Patty at his side, staring at Chalender while big tears slipped from her cheek and fell, streaking the air with a glistening thread of light. And she mopped with a little handkerchief the clammy forehead of Chalender, on whose knotted brow big drops of sweat glowed like tears from squeezed eyelids. RoBards was too tired to resent. He would lift himself heavily from his chair and go to his breakfast, and then to the gig that was to carry him to New York. He would sleep for miles, but his horse knew the way. He slept through hours of courtroom boredom, too, but at night in his room at the Astor House he was wide awake. Below him Broadway roared in the flare of its gas lamps, the busses going to and fro like vast glowworms. But his thoughts were in Westchester. He was further depressed by a hanging. At the new Tombs prison the first execution had just taken place. The dead criminal had murdered his wife, the pretty hot corn girl, whose cry, “Lily white corn! Buy my lily white corn!” rang in RoBards’ ears. It seemed impossible that any man should destroy so pretty a thing, a thing that he must have loved much once. The thought of the pretty girl made him anxious for his own pretty Patty. He was glad that he had not throttled her in one of his onsets of mad justice. He longed to hurry home to hear her voice and be sure of her. But he could not go back for many days. And then a shift in the docket suddenly released him and he set out at once. The long drive was an ordeal, but there was a wonderful sense of perfectness in his heart when his dusty horse at last turned into the road that gave his home to his eyes. He was the pilgrim whose strength just lasts the pilgrimage out. There was his Mecca, the Jerusalem of his heart’s desire! His home, the place established by his father, the fireside where his wife awaited him, the fane where his children were gathered. It was the spirit of the time to let the poetic mood exult in high apostrophic strains. He felt a longing to cry out something beginning with “O thou——!” He could not find the word enormous enough for his love, but the inarticulateness of his ecstasy shattered his soul with a joyous awe. Oh, that House where it waited on its hill, throned on its hill and reigning there! Thou Tulip Tree! that standest there like a guardian seneschal! or like the canopy above a throne! like something—he knew not what, except that it was beautiful and noble and beyond all things precious. As the horse plodded up the steep road, RoBards’ heart climbed, too. He was uplifted with a vague piety, such as he had felt when first he saw the dome of the Statehouse at Albany and felt the glory of citizenship, felt the majesty of his State. This home was the capitol of that people which was his family. It bore the name he bore, as a franchise, a title, a dignity, and therewith a mighty responsibility.