The colonel looked about him eagerly. It was all so like, and yet so
different--shrunken somewhat, and faded, but yet, like a woman one
loves, carried into old age something of the charm of youth. The old
town, whose ripeness was almost decay, whose quietness was scarcely
distinguishable from lethargy, had been the home of his youth, and he
saw it, strange to say, less with the eyes of the lad of sixteen who
had gone to the war, than with those of the little boy to whom it had
been, in his tenderest years, the great wide world, the only world he
knew in the years when, with his black boy Peter, whom his father had
given to him as a personal attendant, he had gone forth to field and
garden, stream and forest, in search of childish adventure. Yonder was
the old academy, where he had attended school. The yellow brick of its
walls had scaled away in places, leaving the surface mottled with pale
splotches; the shingled roof was badly dilapidated, and overgrown here
and there with dark green moss. The cedar trees in the yard were in
need of pruning, and seemed, from their rusty trunks and scant
leafage, to have shared in the general decay. As they drove down the
street, cows were grazing in the vacant lot between the bank, which
had been built by the colonel's grandfather, and the old red brick
building, formerly a store, but now occupied, as could be seen by the
row of boxes visible through the open door, by the post-office.
The little boy, an unusually handsome lad of five or six, with blue
eyes and fair hair, dressed in knickerbockers and a sailor cap, was
also keenly interested in the surroundings.
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