though they were evidently loquacious among themselves, neither their
footsteps nor their voices reached the ears of the beholders. Wherever
there was a venerable old house, of fifty years' standing and upwards,
surrounded by its elm or walnut trees, with its dark and weather-beaten
barn, its well, its orchard and stone-walls, all ancient and all in good
repair around it, there a little group of these people assembled. Such
parties were mostly composed of an aged man and woman, with the younger
members of a family; their faces were full of joy, so deep that it
assumed the shade of melancholy; they pointed to each other the minutest
objects about the homesteads, things in their hearts, and were now
comparing them with the originals. But where hollow places by the
wayside, grass-grown and uneven, with unsightly chimneys rising ruinous
in the midst, gave indications of a fallen dwelling and of hearths long
cold, there did a few of the strangers sit them down on the mouldering
beams, and on the yellow moss that had overspread the door-stone. The
men folded their arms, sad and speechless; the women wrung their hands
with a more vivid expression of grief; and the little children tottered
to their knees, shrinking away from the open grave of domestic love.
And wherever a recent edifice reared its white and flashy front on the
foundation of an old one, there a gray-haired man might be seen to shake
his staff in anger at it, while his aged dame and their offspring
appeared to join in their maledictions, forming a fearful picture in the
ghostly moon light. While these scenes were passing, the one figure in
the rear of all the rest was descending the hollow towards the mill, and
the eyes of David and Esther were drawn thence to a pair with whom they
could fully sympathize. It was a youth in a sailor's dress and a pale
slender maiden, who met each other with a sweet embrace in the middle of
the street.

"How long it must be since they parted," observed David.