It is usually dark when the shabby little narrow-gauge train brings us home to Hillsboro from wanderings in the great world, and the big pond by the station is full of stars.  Up on the hill the lights of the village twinkle against the blurred mass of Hemlock Mountain, and above them the stars again.  It is very quiet, the station is black and deserted, the road winding up to the village glimmers uncertainly in the starlight, and dark forms hover vaguely about.  Strangers say that it is a very depressing station at which to arrive, but we know better.  There is no feeling in the world like that with which one starts up the white road, stars below him in the quiet pool, stars above him in the quiet sky, friendly lights showing the end of his journey is at hand, and the soft twilight full of voices all familiar, all welcoming.

Poor old Uncle Abner Rhodes, returning from an attempt to do business in the city, where he had lost his money, his health, and his hopes, said he didn’t see how going up to Heaven could be so very different from walking up the hill from the station with Hemlock Mountain in front of you.  He said it didn’t seem to him as though even in heaven you could feel more than then that you had got back where there are some folks, that you had got back home.

Sometimes when the stars hang very bright over Hemlock Mountain and the Necronsett River sings loud in the dusk, we remember the old man’s speech, and, though we smile at his simplicity, we think, too, that the best which awaits us can only be very much better but not so very different from what we have known here.

PETUNIAS—­THAT’S FOR REMEMBRANCE

It was a place to which, as a dreamy, fanciful child escaping from nursemaid and governess, Virginia had liked to climb on hot summer afternoons.  She had spent many hours, lying on the grass in the shade of the dismantled house, looking through the gaunt, uncovered rafters of the barn at the white clouds, like stepping-stones in the broad blue river of sky flowing between the mountain walls.

Older people of the summer colony called it forlorn and desolate—­the deserted farm, lying high on the slope of Hemlock Mountain—­but to the child there was a charm about the unbroken silence which brooded over the little clearing.  The sun shone down warmly on the house’s battered shell and through the stark skeleton of the barn.  The white birches, strange sylvan denizens of door and barnyard, stood shaking their delicate leaves as if announcing sweetly that the kind forest would cover all the wounds of human neglect, and soon everything would be as though man had not lived.  And everywhere grew the thick, strong, glistening grass, covering even the threshold with a cushion on which the child’s foot fell as noiselessly as a shadow.  It used to seem to her that nothing could ever have happened in this breathless spot.