ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had
sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a box-like house on
Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out
on the porch early, very early summer mornings.

You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant
there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he
had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its
black strength and its green tendrils down, down, until he ceased to
struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had
thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.

"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just
seemed to kind of pine away."

* * * * *

It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this
memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market.
Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of
eggs, the butter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness
over him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the Subway
he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face
was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung
loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out.

"Gosh!" he said. "Gosh, I--"

He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into
the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A