of the houses she let the horses slow down to a walk and her wild, reckless mood passed.  She became thoughtful and muttered words.  Sometimes tears came into her eyes.  And then when she came back into town she again drove furiously through the quiet streets.  But for the influence of her husband and the respect he inspired in people’s minds she would have been arrested more than once by the town marshal.

Young David Hardy grew up in the house with this woman and as can well be imagined there was not much joy in his childhood.  He was too young then to have opinions of his own about people, but at times it was difficult for him not to have very definite opinions about the woman who was his mother.  David was always a quiet, orderly boy and for a long time was thought by the people of Winesburg to be something of a dullard.  His eyes were brown and as a child he had a habit of looking at things and people a long time without appearing to see what he was looking at.  When he heard his mother spoken of harshly or when he overheard her berating his father, he was frightened and ran away to hide.  Sometimes he could not find a hiding place and that confused him.  Turning his face toward a tree or if he was indoors toward the wall, he closed his eyes and tried not to think of anything.  He had a habit of talking aloud to himself, and early in life a spirit of quiet sadness often took possession of him.

On the occasions when David went to visit his grandfather on the Bentley farm, he was altogether contented and happy.  Often he wished that he would never have to go back to town and once when he had come home from the farm after a long visit, something happened that had a lasting effect on his mind.

David had come back into town with one of the hired men.  The man was in a hurry to go about his own affairs and left the boy at the head of the street in which the Hardy house stood.  It was early dusk of a fall evening and the sky was overcast with clouds.  Something happened to David.  He could not bear to go into the house where his mother and father lived, and on an impulse he decided to run away from home.  He intended to go back to the farm and to his grandfather, but lost his way and for hours he wandered weeping and frightened on country roads.  It started to rain and lightning flashed in the sky.  The boy’s imagination was excited and he fancied that he could see and hear strange things in the darkness.  Into his mind came the conviction that he was walking and running in some terrible void where no one had ever been before.  The darkness about him seemed limitless.  The sound of the wind blowing in trees was terrifying.  When a team of horses approached along the road in which he walked he was frightened and climbed a fence.  Through a field he ran until he came into another road and getting upon his knees felt of the soft ground with his fingers.  But for the figure of his grandfather, whom he was afraid he would never find in the darkness, he thought the world must be altogether empty.  When his cries were heard by a farmer who was walking home from town and he was brought back to his father’s house, he was so tired and excited that he did not know what was happening to him.