He took the familiar turning to the right at the head of the street, and as he plodded along the slippery walk he decided that one of the first things he must do was to buy sealskin cap and gloves.  The thought of sleighing cheered him for a moment, until, now on the outskirts of the village, he was sanitarily perturbed by the adjacency of dwelling houses and barns.  Some were even connected.  Cruel memories of bitter morning chores oppressed him.  The thought of chapped hands and chilblains was almost terrifying, and his heart sank at sight of the double storm-windows, which he knew were solidly fastened and unraisable, while the small ventilating panes, the size of ladies’ handkerchiefs, smote him with sensations of suffocation.  Agatha’ll like California, he thought, calling to his mind visions of roses in dazzling sunshine and the wealth of flowers that bloomed the twelve months round.

And then, quite illogically, the years were bridged and the whole leaden weight of East Falls descended upon him like a damp sea fog.  He fought it from him, thrusting it off and aside by sentimental thoughts on the “honest snow,” the “fine elms,” the “sturdy New England spirit,” and the “great homecoming.”  But at sight of Agatha’s house he wilted.  Before he knew it, with a recrudescent guilty pang, he had tossed the half-smoked cigar away and slackened his pace until his feet dragged in the old lifeless, East Falls manner.  He tried to remember that he was the owner of Childs’ Cash Store, accustomed to command, whose words were listened to with respect in the Employers’ Association, and who wielded the gavel at the meetings of the Chamber of Commerce.  He strove to conjure visions of the letters in black and gold, and of the string of delivery wagons backed up to the sidewalk.  But Agatha’s New England spirit was as sharp as the frost, and it travelled to him through solid house-walls and across the intervening hundred yards.

Then he became aware that despite his will he had thrown the cigar away.  This brought him an awful vision.  He saw himself going out in the frost to the woodshed to smoke.  His memory of Agatha he found less softened by the lapse of years than it had been when three thousand miles intervened.  It was unthinkable.  No; he couldn’t do it.  He was too old, too used to smoking all over the house, to do the woodshed stunt now.  And everything depended on how he began.  He would put his foot down.  He would smoke in the house that very night ... in the kitchen, he feebly amended.  No, by George, he would smoke now.  He would arrive smoking.  Mentally imprecating the cold, he exposed his bare hands and lighted another cigar.  His manhood seemed to flare up with the match.  He would show her who was boss.  Right from the drop of the hat he would show her.

Josiah Childs had been born in this house.  And it was long before he was born that his father had built it.  Across the low stone fence, Josiah could see the kitchen porch and door, the connected woodshed, and the several outbuildings.  Fresh from the West, where everything was new and in constant flux, he was astonished at the lack of change.  Everything was as it had always been.  He could almost see himself, a boy, doing the chores.  There, in the woodshed, how many cords of wood had he bucksawed and split!  Well, thank the Lord, that was past.