What, at that time, made the hearts in the house swell to the bursting-point, what went on in the shadowed souls and issued from them in part, in the self-forgetfulness of fear, or became a deed, a deed of desperation—­all that may pass through the memory of the man with whom we have been occupied.  It is thirty-one years today since he returned to his home town from a long absence.  So we turn back the thirty-one years and find a young man instead of the old one whom we leave.  He is tall, but not so strong; and, like the old man, he wears his brown hair cut short at the back and brushed into a “corkscrew-curl” above his high white forehead.  The sternness of the old man does not yet appear in his face, and the scar of mental pain endured has not yet been stamped upon his good-humored expression.  Yet he is far from showing the light-hearted carelessness usually belonging to his age and the easy-going manners that are so frequently habitual with the traveling journeyman.  The high road still leads him through the dense woods; but from the town, far down below, the sound of St. George’s bells rises up to the height, as impossible to restrain as a mother flying to the loved child that comes toward her.  Home!  How much lies in this one short syllable!  What swells within the human heart when the voice of home, the tone of the bells, calls a welcome to him who is returning from abroad, the tone that called the child to church, the boy to his confirmation and his first communion, that spoke to him every hour!  In the idea of home, all our good angels embrace one another.

Tears gathered in our young wanderer’s serious and yet kindly eyes.  If he had not been ashamed he would have sobbed aloud.  He felt as if he had only dreamed his sojourn away from home and, now that he was awake, could scarcely remember the dream; as if he had only dreamed that he had grown to be a man while abroad; as if it had always seemed to him in his dreams that he was only dreaming abroad in order, when he should wake up at home, to be able to tell about it.  It might have been noticed that, in spite of all this inward agitation of the moment, he did not fail to see the cobweb that the breeze from home laid as a greeting against his coat collar, and that he carefully dried his tears so that they might not fall on his neckerchief, and that he removed the last, tiniest scraps of the silver thread with the most persistent patience before he gave himself up to his feeling for home with his whole soul.  And even his attachment to his home was in part only an expression of his obstinate need of cleanliness which made him regard everything alien that threatened to fly against him as dirt; and this need in turn sprang from the warmth of feeling with which he embraced everything that stood in closer relation to his personality.  The clothes on his body were a piece of home to him, from which he must ward off everything strange.