His health failed gradually, and the end came in peace. He had dealt very generously by me. I found it would take a long time to settle the estate, and resolved to return home for part of a year at least.
How everything had changed! Chicago had made great strides, increased her business, widened her borders. Fresh from beautiful cities that had taken hundreds of years in their growth, this had hardly begun. What was a place thirty or so years old compared to their centuries of advancement!
Dickens had been over and touched up the West with his caustic pen. Many people in Europe seemed to think we as a nation were reverting to the Indian type and lived in wigwams. I was astonished at times at the little our neighbors really knew about us, compared with our knowledge of the different European countries.
After all my fascinating rambling about, and my different attainments, this was home, and a man's birthplace and his boyhood remembrances are always dear to him. Two lines of a poem credited to Stoddard always suggest this meeting to me:
"My mother fell on my neck and wept,
She kissed me and then she sighed,
And our hearts were filled with a silent grief
For * * * * the one who had died,"
and that was father.
Chris was home to supper. Homer and his wife came in. Sophie had been a great friend of the Little Girl's I remembered. Oh, how dear and sweet it was. Mother kept studying me—she had in her mind the boy who went away.