I thought to take up the thread of life where I had dropped it near a score of years before, and complete the web which fancy had embroidered with many a flower of memory and hope and love.  I had forgotten that the loom weaves steadily and persistently whether my hand be on it or not, and that I can never mend the rent in the fabric I so long neglected.

My record elsewhere is replete with numerous accidents by flood and field—­with the epochs of meetings and marryings, of births and deaths.  Meanwhile, the friends who had held fast to me through all these changes wrote ever in the selfsame vein, and plotted for my return with such even and sturdy faith that I had grown to look upon them as having drunk at the fountain of immortal youth.

Of course the delectable spring gushed out of the heart of one of those dear old hills that walled in the village, for how else could they have quaffed it?  The bones of more than two centuries pave the highway between New England and California.  As jubilant as young Lochinvar, I came out of the West one summer dawn, and took train for Heartsease.  I had resolved to compass in a single week the innumerable landmarks that dot mountain and desert and prairie—­to leap as it were from sea to sea, from the present to the past, from manhood to early youth.

Is it any wonder that I forestalled the time, and was a day and a night distant before inquiring friends discovered my flight?  Is it any wonder that the shrieking and swaying train seemed slow to me, for already my spirit had folded its swift wings in the nest-like village of Heartsease?  I had, moreover, by this brilliant manoeuvre, left the bitter cup of parting untasted—­but nothing more serious than this—­and seemed to have won a whole day from the clutches of Time, who deals them out so stingily to the expectant and impatient watcher.

San Francisco faces the sunrise, but there is a broad glittering bay and a coast range with brawny bare shoulders between them:  I sailed over the flashing water, rode under the mountains and threaded three tunnels before I began to realize that I was a fugitive from home.  It was midsummer; the car-windows were half open; whiffs of warm wind blew in upon me scented with bay-leaves and sage.  For a moment I forgot Heartsease and the home of my youth, and turned tenderly to take a last farewell of the beloved land of my adoption.  The corn was cut and stacked in long dusty rows:  it looked like a deserted camp; the grain was down; small squirrels skipped lightly over the shining stubble, whisking their bushy tails like puffs of smoke.  It seemed to me that no fairer land ever baked in summer’s sunshine.  Even the parched earth, with its broken and powdered crust, was lovely in my eyes.  Small day-owls sat in the corners of the fences, when there were any fences to sit in, and nodded to me from behind their feather masks:  all the birds of the air taunted me with heads on one side and drooping wings.  I might escape trusting humanity and steal away betimes, but these airy messengers waylaid me and chirped a sarcastic adieu from every field we crossed.