I gladly returned, like a tired child, to the kindly faces and hearty greetings of my loving and much loved father, mother, brothers, green fields, and all the beautiful children of summer.
"Born where the night owl hooted to the stars,
Cradled where sunshine crept through leafy bars;
Reared where wild roses bloomed most fair,
And songs of meadow larks made glad the summer air,
"Each dainty zephyr whispers follow me,
Ten thousand leaflets beckon from each tree;
All say, 'why give a life to longings vain?
Leave fame and gold: come home: come home again.'
"I hear the forest murmuring 'he has come'
A feathered chorus' joyous welcome home;
Each flower that nods a greeting seems a part
Of nature's welcome back to nature's heart."
The old home was much changed, and for the better. With much patient toil, the unsightly rocks and stumps had been removed from the fields which sloped gracefully to the little river and were covered with tall, waving, luxuriant grasses, starred with buttercups, clover, and daisies. The dilapidated house and barn had given place to modern buildings; apple, pear, and peach-trees, covered with fragrant blossoms were substituted for their decayed and skeleton prototypes; the narrow, crooked, muddy lane, where horses and wagons had struggled through the knee-deep, and often hub-deep sticky clay, had become a firm and fairly straight highway.
My house in the tree on the hilltop, where I had often rehearsed my orations and sermons in such stentorian tones that the amazed cows lifted their tails on high and took to their heels, welcomed me back embowered in leafy new-grown branches.
My second brother, realizing that as "unto the bow the cord is, as unto the child the mother, so unto man the woman is—useless one without the other," had taken unto himself a good wife, the daughter of the deacon, our next neighbor. My mother thus had a much needed helper, as their farms, like their owners, were joined in wedlock.
[Illustration: I Rehearsed My Orations with Startling Effect.]
The worthy deacon and my deeply religious father alternately led the family devotions, and peace and comfort prevailed. The mowing machine, horse-hoe, corn-planter and power-rake dispensed with the drudgery of the scythe and back-breaking hand tools. A protective tariff had set the mill wheels rolling in the neighboring cities, thus furnishing excellent markets for all the products of the farm. The sky-scraping shoe manufactories, where men, like automatons, delved night and day for a few weeks and then leaving them to semi-starvation for the rest of the year, had not yet arrived.
One of my brothers had, like most of the farmers of that day, his little shop where in winter he coined a few hundred dollars making boots and shoes, and where I earned many precious pennies, blackballing the edges and occasionally pegging by hand, all of which is now done by machinery.