He entered a carpenter’s shop.  On the bench was an unfinished door, a plane left where it had been shoved half the length of its edge, the fresh pine shaving still curling over the side.  He left with an uncanny feeling that the carpenter, breathing softly, had watched him from some hiding-place, and would now come stealthily out to push his plane again.

He turned into a baker’s shop and saw freshly chopped kindling piled against the oven, and dough actually on the kneading-tray.  In a tanner’s vat he found fresh bark.  In a blacksmith’s shop he entered next the fire was out, but there was coal heaped beside the forge, with the ladling-pool and the crooked water-horn, and on the anvil was a horseshoe that had cooled before it was finished.

With something akin to terror, he now turned from this street of shops into one of those with the pleasant dwellings, eager to find something alive, even a dog to bark an alarm.  He entered one of the gardens, clicking the gate-latch loudly after him, but no one challenged.  He drew a drink from the well with its loud-rattling chain and clumsy, water-sodden bucket, but no one called.  At the door of the house he whistled, stamped, pounded, and at last flung it open with all the noise he could make.  Still his hungry ears fed on nothing but sinister echoes, the barren husks of his own clamour.  There was no curt voice of a man, no quick, questioning tread of a woman.  There were dead white ashes on the hearth, and the silence was grimly kept by the dumb household gods.

His nervousness increased.  So vividly did his memory people the streets and shops and houses that the air was vibrant with sound,—­low-toned conversations, shouts, calls, laughter, the voices of children, the creaking of wagons, pounding hammers, the clangour of many works; yet all muffled away from him, as if coming from some phantom-land.  His eyes, too, were kept darting from side to side by vague forms that flitted privily near by, around corners, behind him, lurking always a little beyond his eyes, turn them quickly as he would.  Now, facing the street, he shouted, again and again, from sheer nervousness; but the echoes came back alone.

He recalled a favourite day-dream of boyhood,—­a dream in which he became the sole person in the world, wandering with royal liberty through strange cities, with no voice to chide or forbid, free to choose and partake, as would a prince, of all the wonders and delights that boyhood can picture; his own master and the master of all the marvels and treasures of earth.  This was like the dream come true; but it distressed him.  It was necessary to find the people at once.  He had a feeling that his instant duty was to break some malign spell that lay upon the place—­or upon himself.  For one of them was surely bewitched.

Out he strode to the middle of the street, between two rows of yellowing maples, and there he shouted again and still more loudly to evoke some shape or sound of life, sending a full, high, ringing call up the empty thoroughfare.  Between the shouts he scanned the near-by houses intently.