With this proud fate before him, in the flush of his imaginative youth Ralph Cranfield had set forth to seek the maid, the treasure, and the venerable sage with his gift of extended empire.  And had he found them?  Alas! it was not with the aspect of a triumphant man who had achieved a nobler destiny than all his fellows, but rather with the gloom of one struggling against peculiar and continual adversity, that he now passed homeward to his mother’s cottage.  He had come back, but only for a time, to lay aside the pilgrim’s staff, trusting that his weary manhood would regain somewhat of the elasticity of youth in the spot where his threefold fate had been foreshown him.  There had been few changes in the village, for it was not one of those thriving places where a year’s prosperity makes more than the havoc of a century’s decay, but, like a gray hair in a young man’s head, an antiquated little town full of old maids and aged elms and moss-grown dwellings.  Few seemed to be the changes here.  The drooping elms, indeed, had a more majestic spread, the weather-blackened houses were adorned with a denser thatch of verdant moss, and doubtless there were a few more gravestones in the burial-ground inscribed with names that had once been familiar in the village street; yet, summing up all the mischief that ten years had wrought, it seemed scarcely more than if Ralph Cranfield had gone forth that very morning and dreamed a day-dream till the twilight, and then turned back again.  But his heart grew cold because the village did not remember him as he remembered the village.

“Here is the change,” sighed he, striking his hand upon his breast.  “Who is this man of thought and care, weary with world-wandering and heavy with disappointed hopes?  The youth returns not who went forth so joyously.”

And now Ralph Cranfield was at his mother’s gate, in front of the small house where the old lady, with slender but sufficient means, had kept herself comfortable during her son’s long absence.  Admitting himself within the enclosure, he leaned against a great old tree, trifling with his own impatience as people often do in those intervals when years are summed into a moment.  He took a minute survey of the dwelling—­its windows brightened with the sky-gleam, its doorway with the half of a millstone for a step, and the faintly-traced path waving thence to the gate.  He made friends again with his childhood’s friend—­the old tree against which he leaned—­and, glancing his eye down its trunk, beheld something that excited a melancholy smile.  It was a half-obliterated inscription—­the Latin word “Effode”—­which he remembered to have carved in the bark of the tree with a whole day’s toil when he had first begun to muse about his exalted destiny.  It might be accounted a rather singular coincidence that the bark just above the inscription had put forth an excrescence shaped not unlike a hand, with the forefinger pointing obliquely at the word of fate.  Such, at least, was its appearance in the dusky light.