Vivid pictures of past
and future; identical in all their essential features, swam before his
closed eyes, languid now from excess of pleasure. Again and again he
drew in the breath of home, and felt it sweeter than the gales from the
Spice Islands or odors from Araby the Blest. Hovering before his fancy,
came sweet eyes, full of bewildering light, half-reproachful, half-sad,
and all-bewitching; a form of such exquisite grace that he wondered not
it swam and undulated before him; over all, the rose-hue of youth, and
the smooth, sweet charm of lip and hand that memory brought him, in that
last timid caress under the pear-tree after sunset.
As soon as he could possibly so arrange his affairs in Boston as to
admit of his taking a journey to Walton, Swan determined to do so. But
affairs will not always consent to an arrangement; and although he
exerted himself to gain a week's leisure, it was not till the Indian
summer was past that he took his place in the stage-coach which plied
between Boston and Walton.
How very short seemed the time since he was last on this road! Yet how
much had things changed! Fifteen years! Was it possible he had been gone
so long? How rapidly they had gone over himself! He felt scarcely a day
older. The stage-coach was aptly termed "Accommodation," and Swan had
great amusement, as he sat with the driver on the box, in noting the
differences in the aspect of houses and people, since his own last ride
over the same road.
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