“Whose house stood here, friend?” said the wanderer, touching the half-buried hearth with his staff, where a fresh furrow overlapped it.
“Don’t know; forget the name; gone West, though, I believe. You know ’em?”
But the wanderer made no response; his eye was now fixed on a curious natural bend or wave in one of the bemossed stone jambs.
“What are you looking at so, father?”
“‘Father!’ Here,” raking with his staff, “my father would sit, and here, my mother, and here I, little infant, would totter between, even as now, once again, on the very same spot, but in the unroofed air, I do. The ends meet. Plough away, friend.”
Best followed now is this life, by hurrying, like itself, to a close.
Few things remain.
He was repulsed in efforts after a pension by certain caprices of law. His scars proved his only medals. He dictated a little book, the record of his fortunes. But long ago it faded out of print—himself out of being—his name out of memory. He died the same day that the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down.
THE END.
THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE SERIES