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The fences what remained of them from former depredations had either fallen utterly to the ground, or assumed a strikingly precarious position. Part of the roof of Mr. Randal's house had been blown off, and the chimneys of several of the Wallencamp houses demolished, and Grandpa's barn twisted and distorted almost beyond recognition.
Josiah, by the way, had married a Wallencamp girl and taken her to West Wallen to live, yet the two were ever faithful attendants at the Wallencamp festivities.
And, at the close of this strange day, I sat alone, in my little room in the Ark, and indited a letter to the following effect: "Having received gratifying overtures from the people of my charge, I had decided, for reasons which I could not then explain, to remain at Wallencamp until May, to which time I looked forward with the delightful hope of seeing my dear ones once more.
Then as I lent myself more and more to the contemplation of that home picture, how restful and happy it grew! but poor old Wallencamp for we were nearing the little settlement now, and the sun was fast westering poor, squalid, solitary, beautiful Wallencamp, as I looked down upon it from the brow of Stony Hill, thrilled me with a troubled sense of some diviner, some half-comprehended glory.
So the question haunted me, not restlessly, but with a vague, tranquil, melancholy interest, as pertaining to the history of some one who had lived and died a few years before; so long indeed, it seemed to me, since I had performed the journey to Wallencamp.
He seemed, somehow, to have divested himself entirely of the old, heedless irresolution. His speech expressed little of doubt or hesitancy. It was full of a bold, bright affirmation; and his step, in these days, had none of the ordinary slow, smiling, philosophical Wallencamp shuffle.
For the chowder, which in due course of events arose to take its place among the viands on the Ark board, I would leave it to that sacred and tenfold mystery with which, to my mind, it was ever enshrouded. I recall the exhibitions held at the school-house, confined exclusively to the native talent of Wallencamp, at which the old and young were assembled to speak pieces.
And now the life in Wallencamp seemed never like real life to me, even in the broadest daylight. It was like a dream the sweet, warm, brightening of the landscape; the vines growing over the low, brown houses; the lazy, summer voices in the air; the skies, too, were a dream and Luther, with his ideally beautiful face and his quaintness and ardor and unworldliness, was a part of the dream.
When, after the meeting he walked with the Keeler family back to the Ark, where he had been hospitably entertained, the Wallencamp boys saw us depart in silent wrath, and I feared that Treachery lay in wait for the Rev. Mr. Rivers.
Little John, when not dreaming, exercises a vast amount of destructive physical force. A little more than a year after I left Wallencamp, I heard of Grandma and Grandpa Keeler's death. "Very quiet and peaceful," they said concerning Grandma, but I had known what sort of a death-bed hers would be. Scarcely a week after she had passed away, Grandpa Keeler followed her.
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