You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe — Read

When he looked from the windows of the train next morning the hills were there. They towered immense and magical into the blue weather, and suddenly the coolness was there, the winy sparkle of the air, and the shining brightness. Above him loomed huge shapes, the dense massed green of the wilderness, the cloven cuts' and gulches of the mountain passes, the dizzy steepness, with the sudden drops below. He could see the little huts stuck to the edge of bank and hollow, toy-small, far below him in the gorges. The everlasting stillness of the earth now met the intimate, toiling slowness of the train as it climbed up round the sinuous curves, and he had an instant sense of something refound that he had always known--something far, near, strange, and so familiar--and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.

At last the train came sweeping down the long sloping bend into the station, But even before it had come to a full halt George had been watching out of the windows and had seen Randy Shepperton and his sister Margaret waiting for him on the platform. Randy, tall and athletic-looking, was teetering restlessly from one foot to another as his glance went back and forth along the windows of the train in search of him. Margaret's strong, big-boned figure was planted solidly, her hands clasped loosely across her waist, and her eyes were darting from car to car with swift intensity. And as George swung down from the steps of the pullman and, valise in hand, strode towards the platform across the rock ballast of the roadbed and the gleaming rails, he knew instantly, with that intuitive feeling of strangeness and recognition; just what they would say to him at the moment of their meeting.