Chapter V: Book FOUR: 345 (5)

All I can say is that I remember how the boy who, on that evening long ago, went slowly away from the barn through the mud of the barnyard, turned his back on the new house, and stopped for a moment on the bridge leading to the old house, sad and frightened. Before him lay a life of adventures (imagined if not actually experienced), but at the moment he went not toward the future but toward the past. In the older house there was, to be sure, a meal to be had without labor--in this case a meal prepared at the hands of a kindly faced woman--and there was also a warm bed into which the boy could crawl to indulge all night long undisturbed in his dreams; but there was something else. A sense of security? It may be, after all, just the sense of security, or assurance of warmth, food, and leisure--most of all leisure--the boy wanted on that evening, that, for some reason I cannot explain, marked the end of boyhood for him.