muscles on the smooth hips of the horses. I
sat down and watched the haystacks turn
rosy in the slanting sunlight.

This was the road over which Antonia and
I came on that night when we got off the train
at Black Hawk and were bedded down in
the straw, wondering children, being taken we
knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes
to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the
dark, and to be again overcome by that oblit-
erating strangeness. The feelings of that night
were so near that I could reach out and touch
them with my hand. I had the sense of coming
home to myself, and of having found out what
a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia
and for me, this had been the road of Destiny;
had taken us to those early accidents of for-
tune which predetermined for us all that we
can ever be. Now I understood that the same
road was to bring us together again. What-
ever we had missed, we possessed together the
precious, the incommunicable past.

-- the end --

[[419]]

p418 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p419w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p420

v?