Just as the oxen were bid stand, the stranger's plough was hitched over sideways, by sudden contact with some sunken stone at the ruin's base.
"There, this is the twentieth year my plough has struck this old hearthstone.

Ah, old man,--sultry day, this." "Whose house stood here, friend ?" said the wanderer, touching the half-buried hearth with his staff, where a fresh furrow overlapped it.
"Don't know; forget the name; gone West, though, I believe.

You know 'em ?" But the wanderer made no response; his eye was now fixed on a curious natural bend or wave in one of the bemossed stone jambs.
"What are you looking at so, father ?" "'_Father_!' Here," raking with his staff, "_my_ father would sit, and here, my mother, and here I, little infant, would totter between, even as now, once again, on the very same spot, but in the unroofed air, I do.

The ends meet.

Plough away, friend." Best followed now is this life, by hurrying, like itself, to a close.
Few things remain.
He was repulsed in efforts after a pension by certain caprices of law.
His scars proved his only medals.