She saw that the timber had been cut down, and fences enclosed cultivated fields where forests had stood when she went away. At a sudden bend in the narrow, irregular road when she held her breath and leaned forward to see the old house where she was born and reared, a sharp cry of pain escaped her. Not a vestige of the homestead remained, save the rocky chimney, standing in memoriam in the centre of a cornfield. She leaned against the low fence, and tears trickled down her cheeks as memory rebuilt the log-house, and placed the split-bottomed rocking-chair on the porch in front, and filled it with the figure of a white-haired old man, with his pipe in his hand and his blurred eyes staring at the moon.
Through the brown corn-stalks she could see the gaping mouth of the well, now partly filled with rubbish; and the wreaths of scarlet cypress which once fringed the shed above it and hung their flaming trumpets down until they almost touched her childish head, as she sang at the well where she scoured the cedar piggin, were bereft of all support and trailed helplessly over the ground. Close to the fence, and beyond the reach of plough and hoe, a yellow four-o'clock with closed flowers marked the location of the little garden; and one tall larkspur leaned against the fence, sole survivor of the blue pets that Edna had loved so well in the early years. She put her fingers through a crevice, broke the plumy spray, and as she pressed it to her face, she dropped her head upon the rails and gave herself up to the flood of painful yet inexpressibly precious memories.
How carefully she had worked and weeded this little plat; how proud she once was of her rosemary and pinks, her double feathery poppies, her sweet-scented lemon-grass; how eagerly she had transplanted wood violets and purple phlox from the forest; how often she had sat on the steps watching for her grandfather's return, and stringing those four-o'clock blossoms into golden crowns for her own young head; and how gayly she had sometimes swung them over Brindle's horns, when she went out to milk her.
"Ah! sad and strange, as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; So sad, so strange, the days that are no more."
With a sob she turned away and walked in the direction of the burying-ground; for there, certainly, she would find all unchanged; graves at least were permanent.
The little spring bubbled as of yore, the brush creepers made a tangled tapestry around it, and crimson and blue convolvulus swung their velvety, dew-beaded chalices above it, as on that June morning long ago when she stood there filling her bucket, waiting for the sunrise.