It was ridiculous, Adam Cartwright thought, for a man of thirty-six years to be so homesick.He stood briefly motionless, only a few steps beyond the church where he’d attended the late Christmas Eve service–chosen because he’d fancied it might end around the same time as the one in distant Nevada where the rest of his family was celebrating the holiday. However, they seemed as far away from him as ever, and now he had a dark journey back along icy roads to a dark boarding-house, where in the morning he’d sit by himself to open the presents they’d sent him, and wonder whether they liked what he’d sent them, or if they’d even received the parcel yet.

Worst of all was the secret fear he’d abandoned family and home for a mirage. He remembered his college years as a time of dizzy bliss, spent pursuing answers to every imaginable question and debating every controversy with a crowd of enthusiastic friends. Harvard had seemed the obvious entry-point to his great new adventure, so here he was, studying advanced engineering, an assistant instructor for the preliminary mathematics classes; but somehow nothing had transpired as he’d expected.

It wasn’t only that Harvard had sent large numbers of her finest young men to fight, and all too often to die, in the war that had just ended–a war he’d only read about in long-delayed newspaper reports, far from any battlefield. The college was moving on from that already, although the Committee of Fifty had not neglected to ask for his donation to their fund for a memorial hall. More shockingly, he’d learned that in his absence civil war had raged through the Scientific School itself, with two of its most influential professors attacking each other on matters from the profound (a strange new theory about the diversity of life) to the trivial (which of the school’s employees had the right to attend its faculty meetings). Somehow, zoology and botany–or, at least, zoologists and botanists–seemed to be lording it over the engineering and chemistry he considered to be more fundamental studies. Great schemes were afoot, but the education of ordinary students seemed overlooked in the excitement.

All in all, the dozen years which had passed so slowly in Nevada seemed to have blown through Cambridge with the speed and savagery of a hurricane, damaging or destroying all the landmarks he remembered. No one, of course, remembered him; the surviving professors’ minds were full of new concerns, new students and associates, while those who had studied with him were scattered far and wide–everywhere, it seemed, but here. As well, perhaps; Adam had no desire to force his presence on people who had lost interest in him. Unlike the students all around him, whose merriment and energy could be heard even at this hour of the night as they engaged in a distant snowball fight, he could find nothing to rekindle lost enthusiasms. The Harvard–even the Boston–he remembered might as well be lying in ashes and ruins around him.

And if so, then no place was reliably sheltered and safe, nothing could truly provide any sort of security.

Well, that was life, he supposed, and there were only two ways to look at life. You could love it, or you could hate it; that was all.

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In a fine house on Beacon Hill, not far across the Charles River from where Adam stood, a young English teacher visiting her newly-married aunt was putting herself to bed (being used to “doing for herself,” she’d declined any assistance from the household’s servants), bothered only by a faint concern for her brother, who was spending the holiday far away with schoolfellows she didn’t much like. Of the fact that during the upcoming year she’d put on mourning for that brother, throw away her career, travel to the far side of the country and back, and, twelve months to the day from this one, joyfully accept a proposal of marriage from a man she had yet to meet, she was serenely unaware–although, had any reader of palms or tea-leaves suggested such a future to her, she’d have faced up to it undaunted.

Only three blocks away, in a big, crowded house on Quincy Street, one remaining fellow-graduate from Adam’s time had finally fallen asleep. Within the week he and Adam would bump into each other outside the new Museum of Zoology, and their companionable chat would prompt a gamble, on the part of that old friend, which would pay off for them both in a fortune far surpassing mere “security.”

Nearest of all to hand–just outside the gates to Harvard Yard–one of the carefree snowball fighters would, in a mere five minutes, find his desperate apologies towards an accidental casualty of war silenced with a snowball to the face, perfectly packed to break apart harmlessly, as if intended for a much-loved younger brother. And the battle would resume with more zest and good humor than before, with the stranger joining the losing side, quite untroubled by fears for his dignity or semi-professorial authority.

Meanwhile, Adam Cartwright–as ignorant of his place in their futures as they were of theirs in his–turned his face up from the center of Cambridge Common towards the empty sky, shivering with tears and laughter and relief.

I don’t hate it, he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!

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