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When he left he made his way across some of the fallow land and some of the stubble fields that had yielded, alas! so futilely, such abundant harvest.  His boyhood days came back to him, when he used to crush down the stubble with his bare feet.  Every rod of the way revealed some memory.  He went into the barn and climbed into the huge, airy loft.  It smelled of straw and years of dust and mice.  The swallows darted in and out, twittering.  How friendly they were!  Year after year they had returned to their nests—­the young birds returning to the homes of the old.  Home even for birds was a thing of first and vital importance.

It was a very old barn that had not many more useful years to stand.  Kurt decided that he would advise that it be strengthened.  There were holes in the rough shingling and boards were off the sides.  In the corners and on the rafters was an accumulation of grain dust as thick as snow.  Mice ran in and out, almost as tame as the swallows.  He seemed to be taking leave of them.  He recalled that he used to chase and trap mice with all a boy’s savage ingenuity.  But that boyish instinct, along with so many things so potential then, was gone now.

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.