At last utterly overcome she leaned her head against my arm, closed her eyes and said, "Take me home. I can't stand any more of it."
Sadly I took her away, back to her room, realizing that we had been too eager. We had oppressed her with the exotic, the magnificent. She was too old and too feeble to enjoy as we had hoped she would enjoy, the color and music and thronging streets of The Magic City.
At the end of the third day father said, "Well, I've had enough." He too, began to long for the repose of the country, the solace of familiar scenes. In truth they were both surfeited with the alien, sick of the picturesque. Their ears suffered from the clamor of strange sounds as their eyes ached with the clash of unaccustomed color. My insistent haste, my desire to make up in a few hours for all their past deprivations seemed at the moment to have been a mistake.
Seeing this, knowing that all the splendors of the Orient could not compensate them for another sleepless night, I decided to cut their visit short and hurry them back to quietude. Early on the fourth morning we started for the LaCrosse Valley by way of Madison—they with a sense of relief, I with a feeling of disappointment. "The feast was too rich, too highly spiced for their simple tastes," I now admitted.
However, a certain amount of comfort came to me as I observed that the farther they got from the Fair the keener their enjoyment of it became!—With bodies at ease and minds untroubled, they now relived in pleasant retrospect all the excitement and bustle of the crowds, all the bewildering sights and sounds of the Midway. Scenes which had worried as well as amazed them were now recalled with growing enthusiasm, as our train, filled with other returning sightseers of like condition, rushed steadily northward into the green abundance of the land they knew so well, and when at six o'clock of a lovely afternoon, they stepped down upon the platform of the weather-beaten little station at West Salem, both were restored to their serene and buoyant selves. The leafy village, so green, so muddy, so lush with grass, seemed the perfection of restful security. The chuckle of robins on the lawns, the songs of cat-birds in the plum trees and the whistle of larks in the pasture appealed to them as parts of a familiar sweet and homely hymn.
Just in the edge of the village, on a four-acre plot of rich level ground, stood an old two-story frame cottage on which I had fixed my interest. It was not beautiful, not in the least like the ideal New England homestead my brother and I had so long discussed, but it was sheltered on the south by three enormous maples and its gate fronted upon a double row of New England elms whose branches almost arched the wide street. Its gardens, rich in grape vines, asparagus beds, plums, raspberries and other fruiting shrubs, appealed with especial power to my mother who had lived so long on the sun-baked plains that the sight of green things growing was very precious in her eyes. Clumps of lilacs, syringa and snow-ball, and beds of old-fashioned flowers gave further evidence of the love and care which the former owners of the place had lavished upon it.
As for myself, the desire to see my aging parents safely sheltered beneath the benignant branches of those sturdy trees would have made me content even with a log cabin. In imagination I perceived this angular cottage growing into something fine and sweet and—our own!
There was charm also in the fact that its western windows looked out upon the wooded hills over which I had wandered as a boy, and whose sky-line had printed itself deep into the lowest stratum of my subconscious memory; and so it happened that on the following night, as we stood before the gate looking out upon that sunset wall of purple bluffs from beneath the double row of elms stretching like a peristyle to the west, my decision came.
"This is my choice," I declared. "Right here we take root. This shall be the Garland Homestead." I turned to my father. "When can you move?"