And we came into other countries that were full of people, and of cities great and small.  A thousand strange faces were turned upon us as we shot past the open doors of houses wherein the table was spread for the domestic meal.  We hailed the field-laborers and the town-artisans at their toil, and every hour plunged deeper and deeper into the old civilization of the East, which in some respects differs greatly from that of our breezy West.  It was time to be thinking on my journey’s end and its probable results.  I seemed to read it all beforehand:  Ellen would greet me at the gate of the parsonage on the edge of Heartsease, looking just as she looked when I parted with her long, long years before.  Ellen had not changed with time:  she had written me the same sweet, placid, sympathetic letters from the beginning, and the beginning was when, a mere child, I had worn out my heart with longing for home, and had at last been welcomed back over the two seas and across the slender chain of flowers that binds the two Americas together—­back to the land I love, California.  Ellen would lead me in all the old paths; we would see the garden in which, as a beautiful boy, I more than once sought her to confess some grief, knowing there was no ear so willing as hers, no heart tenderer, no counsel more comforting.  We would row up the stream that runs under the hill by the willows, and strand in the same shallow nook, in honor of the festal Saturdays dead and gone.  We would gather the old friends about us, and eat very large apples by the study-window; we would hunt nests in the hayloft and acorns in the wood; the school-room would take us back again, and all the half-obliterated memories of the past would glow with fresher color.  A hundred hands would be stretched out to me, and I would recognize the clasp of each.  Ah, happy day when I again returned to Heartsease and found the lost thread of my youth unbroken, and I had only to weave on and complete the fabric so long neglected!

There were a dozen trains to enter and get out of before I could be whirled across the country to Heartsease.  Now that Heartsease was easily attainable, all the restless world would be fleeing thither, and it would no longer be worthy of its name.  I felt my way from town to town, pausing an hour here, another hour there, in an impatient mood, for the last train was behind time, and I feared I should not arrive in the village at the moment of all others I most desired to.  Why should I not come at sunset to the parsonage—­one from the land of the sunset wearing, as it were, his colors on his heart?  The hour is so mysterious and pathetic—­the very hour to step in upon the village, for so you can gloat over it all night, before the sun has laid the whole truth bare to you on the following morning.  And moreover I had not written Ellen of my intended visit:  why should I, when she had been looking for me these ten years at least?  Why should I say, “At last I am coming,” when a thousand things might have