glish boat.

* * *

But when the great ship entered the English Channel, Alec could
scarcely bear his impatience. It would have astonished those who thought
him unhuman if they had known the tumultuous emotions that rent his
soul. His fellow-passengers never suspected that the bronzed, silent man
who sought to make no acquaintance, was the explorer with whose name all
Europe was ringing; and it never occurred to them that as he stood in
the bow of the ship, straining his eyes for the first sight of England,
his heart was so full that he would not have dared to speak. Each
absence had intensified his love for that sea-girt land, and his eyes
filled with tears of longing as he thought that soon now he would see it
once more. He loved the murky waters of the English Channel because they
bathed its shores, and he loved the strong west wind. The west wind
seemed to him the English wind; it was the trusty wind of seafaring men,
and he lifted his face to taste its salt buoyancy. He could not think of
the white cliffs of England without a deep emotion; and when they passed
the English ships, tramps outward bound or stout brigantines driving
before the wind with their spreading sails, he saw the three-deckers of
Trafalgar and the proud galleons of the Elizabethans. He felt a personal
pride in those dead adventurers who were spiritual ancestors of his, and
he was proud to be an Englishman because Frobisher and Effingham were
English, and Drake and Raleigh and the glorious Nelson.

And then his pride in the great empire which had sprung from that small
island, a greater Rome in a greater world, dissolved into love as his
wandering thoughts took him to green meadows and rippling streams. Now
at last he need no longer keep so tight a rein upon his fancy, but
could allow it to wander at will; and he thought of the green hedgerows
and the pompous elm trees; he thought of the lovely wayside cottages
with their simple flowers and of the winding roads that were so good to
walk on. He was breathing the English air now, and his spirit was
uplifted. He loved the grey soft mists of low-lying country, and he
loved the smell of the heather as he stalked across the moorland. There
was no river he knew that equalled the kindly Thames, with the fair
trees of its banks and its quiet backwaters, where white swans gently
moved amid the waterlilies. His thoughts went to Oxford, with its
spires, bathed in a violet haze, and in imagination he sat in