But five minutes later as Paul trudged along the forest path toward his home, the unaccustomed light of battle that had momentarily kindled in his eyes began to fade.  There glowed in them no such lasting triumph as should come from a boy’s first victory.  Instead, they wore again the far-away look of dreamy pensiveness.  Already, his thoughts were back in their own world, a world peopled with fancies and panoplied with imaginings.  Suddenly he halted, and threw back his head, intently listening.  High and far away came the honking cry of wild geese in flight; travelers of the upper air-paths, winging their way southward.  Distance softened the harshness of their journeying clamor into a note of appealing wanderlust.

Paul’s lips were parted and his eyes aglow.  The memory of the fight he had dreaded was effaced; the bruises on his sensitive face were forgotten.  His heart was drinking an elixir through his ears, and at the sounds floating down from the heights new fancies leaped within him.

Ham with his eyes shrewdly fixed upon his brother swung his books to his other hand and shrugged his shoulders.  He, too, was looking in fancy beyond the misty hills, but not to the flight of geese.  He saw cities with shaft-like structures biting the sky and dark banners of smoke floating above the clash of conflict.  His heart was burning to be at the center of that conflict.

He, too, heard a song of sirens, but it was such a song as Richard Whittington heard when bare-footed in Pauntley the notes of the Bow bells stole out to him: 

    “Sang of a city that was blazoned like a missal-book,
      Black with oaken gables, carven and inscrolled;
    Every street a colored page, every sign a hieroglyph,
      Dusky with enchantments, a city paved with gold.”

Then he gazed about the desolate country where morning wore to night in a sequence of hard chore upon hard chore, and he groaned between his set teeth.

Here and there along the way stood deserted houses where the wind searched the interiors through the eyeless sockets of unglazed windows and where the roof-trees were broken and twisted.  They were blighting symbols of this soul-breaking existence in a land of abandoned farms where Opportunity never came.  They were mutely eloquent of surrender after struggle.  They summed up the hazard of life where to abate the fight and rest meant to lose the fight and starve.

His heart told him that no other battle-field was hard enough or desperate enough to spell his defeat.  The world was his if he could go out into the world to claim it, but here in this meager land of barrenness his soul would strangle without a fight.  The things that had long flamed in his heart had flamed secretly, like a smothered blaze which gnaws the vitals out of a ship whose hatches are battened down.  He, too, had kept the hatches of silence battened.  But through many wakeful nights the voice that speaks