Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 November 1884 — Homesickness. [ARTICLE]

Homesickness.

Reader, were you ever homesick? When you first left the parental roof and went out into the wide world to hew out a road to fortune and to fame, did you not feel that strange sense of unrest that made it seem impossible that you could live another hour away from home ? Where one has not had this experience a hundred have. Well do I remember, when, at fifteen years of age, I went out from father, mother, home and friends, and sought an education nearly five hundred miles away. The novelty of my new surroundings in the city,- having passed all my life on a farm, sustained me for a month or more, and then I felt the gnawing at my heart one evening, and for weeks and months it came and came again. I was standing in the front yard at my boarding place, when suddenly a lump arose in my throat and almost choked me. I was looking in the direction of my old home, and my gaze went over the tree-tops on the bluff beyond, and wandered on into space, where I saw, in imagination, the old fireside. Mother, dear old mother, was sitting there at her accustomed place, knitting away as if her life depended on “turning the heel* of that stocking' before sleeping. Father was reading the village paper, just as I had seen him do a hundred times. My brothers and sisters were all there as usual, and the cat dozed and purred before the fire of crackling branches, and the back-log of hissing hot elm rolled from its place and scattered embers here and there, as I had seen it de over and over again. The shouts of the children, the terror of the cat, the hurry of mother to brush the glowing coals from the old rag carpet before they should add to the number of unsightly holes already burned in it, the activity of father in checking the progress of the back-log with his heavy boot, the overturning andirons, the choking smoke and all the accompanying excitement and effort to repair damages, were as I had seen them often; but I was not there to help, and an unfathomable longing to go and participate in the dear old. scene came upon me.

What would I not have given for the poor privilege of burning my fingers in a futile effort to set up the fire-dogs ? How I should have leaped and danced for joy even to have coughed from breathing the smoke! It would have been only second to heaven to have had mother bind up my blistered fingers and little sister to have put her chubby hands upon them and hurt them in her anxiety to find out whether I was shamming. But no; this picture was but a mirage, and I must wait. One day a letter came. It said another sister had been born to me. How very strange I felt. I had a sister I had never seen, and when I talked about it at the table, the other boarders laughed at me and said I was homesick. I cried each night when I had gone to bed,, and in the morning my pillow was wet with tears, and at table my roommate told me how I had called for mother in my sleep,and so I was laughing stock again. The lady of the house was kind to me, and often, when she had found me weeping, had stroked my hair, so like my mother had in years agone, I wept afresh. At last came a day when I was going home. The hours seemed ages, and the minutes to elapse before the train would come were hours of torture. At last, good-by was said to my new friends, the bell was tapped and I was on the way. The speed was far too slow, and I almost felt that I could go faster if I were afoot. When at last the brakeman called the names of stations that I knew, my heart beat high with ever rising hope, and I was in an ecstasy of joy. At last the whistle sounded and the brakeman called the station near my home. The train, it seemed, would never stop. The platform reached, I sprang off. What change had come upon the world ? The buildings I had thought so high two years before were very low; the boys J knew were almost men; the girls were in long dresses, and my little sweetheart was so tall and slender, shy and blushing, I could hardly speak to her. At home it was the same. Father and mother were more gray, the children larger, and I called the one I’d never seen by the name I’d called the next one older before I went away. The cat was sleeping and inactive, and the fire upon the hearth not half so bright. Alas I a change had come, and home ■was never home again.— Eqchange.