Luxuriously Roger lit a cigar and climbed to the front seat with George.  Up the steep and crooked road the stout horses tugged their way, and the wagon creaked, and the Gale River, here only a brook, came gurgling, dashing to meet them—­down from the mountains, from the farm, from Roger’s youth to welcome him home.  And the sun was flashing through the pines.  As they drew near the farmhouse through a grove of sugar maples, he heard shrill cries of, “There they come!” And he glimpsed the flying figures of George’s brothers, Bob and Tad.  George whipped up the horses, the wagon gained upon the boys and reached the house but a few rods behind the little runners.  Edith was waiting by the door, fresh and smiling, blooming with health.  How well this suited her, Roger thought.  Amid a gay chorus of greetings he climbed down heavily out of the wagon, looked about him and drew a deep breath.  The long lazy days on the farm had begun.

From the mountain side the farm looked down on a wide sweeping valley of woods and fields.  The old house straggled along the road, with addition after addition built on through generations by many men and women.  Here lay the history, unread, of the family of Roger Gale.  Inside there were steps up and down from one part to another, queer crooks in narrow passageways.  The lower end was attached to the woodshed, and the woodshed to the barn.  Above the house a pasture dotted with gray boulders extended up to a wood of firs, and out of this wood the small river which bore the name of the family came rushing down the field in a gully, went under the road, swept around to the right and along the edge of a birch copse just below the house.  The little stream grew quieter there and widened into a mill pond.  At the lower end was a broken dam and beside it a dismantled mill.  Here was peace for Roger’s soul.  The next day at dawn he awakened, and through the window close by his bed he saw no tall confining walls; his eye was carried as on wings out over a billowy blanket of mist, soft and white and cool and still, reaching over the valley.  From underneath to his sensitive ears came the numberless voices of the awakening sleepers there, cheeps and tremulous warbles from the birch copse just below, cocks crowing in the valley, and ducks and geese, dogs, sheep and cattle faintly heard from distant farms.  Just so it had been when he was a boy.  How unchanged and yet how new were these fresh hungry cries of life.  From the other end of the house he heard Edith’s tiny son lustily demanding his breakfast, as other wee boys before him had done for over a hundred years, as other babies still unborn would do in the many years to come.  Soon the cry of the child was hushed.  Quiet fell upon the house.  And Roger sank again into deep happy slumber.