excitements and secrecies. Somewhere in the throng their own two
children were busy unless they had already started home.

For years he had held a professorship in the college in this town,
driving in and out from his home; but with the close of this academic
year he was to join the slender file of Southern men who have been
called to Northern universities: this change would mean the end of
life here. Both thought of this now--of the last Christmas in the
house; and with the same impulse they turned their gaze back to it.

More than half a century ago the one starved genius of the Shield, a
writer of songs, looked out upon the summer picture of this land, its
meadows and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out the spirit of
an entire vineyard when he bursts a solitary grape upon his tongue,
he, the song writer, drained drop by drop the wine of that scene into
the notes of a single melody. The nation now knows his song, the world
knows it--the only music that has ever captured the joy and peace of
American home life--embodying the very soul of it in the clear amber
of sound.

This house was one of such homesteads as the genius sang of: a low,
old-fashioned, brown-walled, gray-shingled house; with chimneys
generous, with green window-shutters less than green and white
window-sills less than white; with feudal vines giving to its walls
their summery allegiance; not young, not old, but standing in the
middle years of its strength and its honors; not needy, not wealthy,
but answering Agar's prayer for neither poverty nor riches.

The two stood on the darkening lawn, looking back at it.