"Then he would walk on, and sit down again and take another view with a different house, but with the same home-like look, and yet exactly suiting the landscape. And at last he would draw places without any houses at all, and yet as if a human being was looking at them, to whom they were in some way a home, just as he drew my bonnet and portfolio on the edge of a hill, so that any one would have known I was somewhere about.
"As we went back, at the close of the day, every object he pointed out seemed to light up with a life of its own, and every step we took was like finding a bird's nest in the grass. He parted with me in the road, saying that he had left his horse somewhere on the hill where he had found me in the morning, and that he should remember the day with pleasure.
"As for me, I thought, as I walked slowly homeward towards the fading sunset, that I never should remember any thing else. When I have read since of the great days of Creation, which are believed to have been years of our time, I have thought of that day, and it has not seemed necessary that the old time should have been different from ours. It seemed an age since I had left the village in the morning, and every thing looked as it does when we go home at the end of term."
"We seem so much older, too, then," said Fanny, "and as if we had seen so much, and should meet ourselves at the gate, little things as we were when we left."
"I thought of myself, and my little sketches of the morning, as if I had been a tame pigeon pecking about before the door, with its little, short feet; and now I had seen the eagle which I had heard of, and his great wings had opened for me all the wide space behind the rim of the hills which enclosed the village. And yet it looked all the more like home for being encompassed with that great region. Every thing looked so old, with a new meaning, and as I approached the house, it looked as it had when I saw it through the spy-glass, and the gate, as I opened it in the stillness of the twilight, seemed to say, with its creak, 'The familiar made strange;' for these words were to me like a sentence in old German text in an English book.
"As I was dressing for tea, I heard the sound of a horse's hoofs, and a moment after a knock at the door. Could I ever know the meaning of those other words of his, 'The strange made familiar,' as I did when I heard it in the sound of the stranger's voice?