One thing only quickened my laggard heart, and that was the all prevalent talk of war.  The debates of Lincoln and Douglas, the consequences of Lincoln’s possible election, the growing dissensions in the Army over Buchanan’s practically overt acts of war—­these made the sole topics of conversation.  I heard my own section, my own State, criticised bitterly, and all Southerners called traitors to that flag I had seen flying over the frontiers of the West.  At times, I say, these things caused my blood to stir once more, though perhaps it was not all through patriotism.

At last, after weeks of travel across a disturbed country, I finally reached the angry hive of political dissension at Washington.  Here I was near home, but did not tarry, and passed thence by stage to Leesburg, in Virginia; and so finally came back into our little valley and the quiet town of Wallingford.  I had gone away the victim of misfortune; I returned home with a broken word and an unfinished promise and a shaken heart.  That was my return.

I got me a horse at Wallingford barns, and rode out to Cowles’ Farms.  At the gate I halted and looked in over the wide lawns.  It seemed to me I noted a change in them as in myself.  The grass was unkempt, the flower beds showed little attention.  The very seats upon the distant gallery seemed unfamiliar, as though arranged by some careless hand.  I opened the gate for myself, rode up to the old stoop and dismounted, for the first time in my life there without a boy to take my horse.  I walked slowly up the steps to the great front door of the old house.  No servant came to meet me, grinning.  I, grandson of the man who built that house, my father’s home and mine, lifted the brazen knocker of the door and heard no footstep anticipate my knock.  The place sounded empty.

Finally there came a shuffling footfall and the door was opened, but there stood before me no one that I recognized.  It was a smallish, oldish, grayish man who opened the door and smiled in query at me.

“I am John Cowles, sir,” I said, hesitating.  “Yourself I do not seem to know—­”

“My name is Halliday, Mr. Cowles,” he replied.  A flush of humiliation came to my face.

“I should know you.  You were my father’s creditor.”

“Yes, sir, my firm was the holder of certain obligations at the time of your father’s death.  You have been gone very long without word to us.  Meantime, pending any action—­”

“You have moved in!”

“I have ventured to take possession, Mr. Cowles.  That was as your mother wished.  She waived all her rights and surrendered everything, said all the debts must be paid—­”

“Of course—­”

“And all we could prevail upon her to do was to take up her quarters there in one of the little houses.”

He pointed with this euphemism toward our old servants’ quarters.  So there was my mother, a woman gently reared, tenderly cared for all her life, living in a cabin where once slaves had lived.  And I had come back to her, to tell a story such as mine!