It was her native village.
How many recollections crowded on her mind when it appeared in sight! Two-and-twenty years.

Her boy's whole life and history.

The last time she looked back upon those roofs among the trees, she carried him in her arms, an infant.

How often since that time had she sat beside him night and day, watching for the dawn of mind that never came; how had she feared, and doubted, and yet hoped, long after conviction forced itself upon her! The little stratagems she had devised to try him, the little tokens he had given in his childish way--not of dulness but of something infinitely worse, so ghastly and unchildlike in its cunning--came back as vividly as if but yesterday had intervened.

The room in which they used to be; the spot in which his cradle stood; he, old and elfin-like in face, but ever dear to her, gazing at her with a wild and vacant eye, and crooning some uncouth song as she sat by and rocked him; every circumstance of his infancy came thronging back, and the most trivial, perhaps, the most distinctly.
His older childhood, too; the strange imaginings he had; his terror of certain senseless things--familiar objects he endowed with life; the slow and gradual breaking out of that one horror, in which, before his birth, his darkened intellect began; how, in the midst of all, she had found some hope and comfort in his being unlike another child, and had gone on almost believing in the slow development of his mind until he grew a man, and then his childhood was complete and lasting; one after another, all these old thoughts sprung up within her, strong after their long slumber and bitterer than ever.
She took his arm and they hurried through the village street.