Red could just about walk.
Sombrely they clambered up the steps into the Pullman.
Middleville was a prosperous and thriving inland town of twenty thousand inhabitants, identical with many towns of about the same size in the middle and eastern United States.
Lane had been born there and had lived there all his life, seldom having been away up to the advent of the war.

So that the memories of home and town and place, which he carried away from America with him, had never had any chance, up to the time of his departure, to change from the vivid, exaggerated image of boyhood.

Since he had left Middleville he had seen great cities, palaces, castles, edifices, he had crossed great rivers, he had traveled thousands of miles, he had looked down some of the famous thoroughfares of the world.
Was this then the reason that Middleville, upon his arrival, seemed so strange, sordid, shrunken, so vastly changed?
He stared, even while he helped Payson off the train--stared at the little brick station at once so familiar and yet so strange, that had held a place of dignity in the picture of his memory.

The moment was one of shock.
Then he was distracted from his pondering by tearful and joyful cries, and deeper voices of men.

He looked up to recognize Blair's mother, father, sister; and men and women whose faces appeared familiar, but whose names he could not recall.