stomed to travel only in America, and to feel at home with
all the different varieties of one's countrymen, such sentiments are
no more than _vers de societe_. _But_ now I know what _Heimweh_
is--the home-pain. I can understand that the Swiss really die of it
sometimes. The home-pain! Neuralgia, you know, and most other acute
pains, attack only one set of nerves. But _Heimweh_ hurts all over.
There is not a muscle of the body, nor the most remote fibre of the
brain, nor a tissue of the heart that does not ache with it. You can't
eat. You can't sleep. You can't read or write or talk. It begins with
the protoplasm of your soul--and reaches forward to the end of time,
and aches every step of the way along. You want to hide your face in a
pillow away from everybody and do nothing but weep, but even that does
not cure. It seems to be too private to help materially. The only
thing I can recommend is to "bust out."

Homesickness is an inexplicable thing. I have heard brides relate how
it attacked them unmercifully and without cause in the midst of their
honeymoon. Girl students, whose sole aim in life has been to come
abroad to study, and who, in finally coming, have fondly dreamed that
the gates of Paradise had swung open before their delighted eyes, have
been among its earliest and most acutely afflicted victims. No
success, no realized ambitions ward it off. Like death, it comes to
high and low alike. One woman, whose name became famous with her first
concert, told me that she spent the first year over here in tears.
Nothing that friends can do, no amount of kindness or hospitality
avails as a preventive. You can take bromides and cure insomnia. You
can take chloroform, and enough of it will prevent seasickness, but
nothing avails for _Heimweh_. And like pride, "let him that thinketh
he standeth take heed lest he fall." I have been in the midst of an
animated, recital of how homesick I had been the day before,
ridiculing myself and my malady with unctuous freedom, when suddenly
Billy's little face would seem to rise out of the flowers on the
dinner-table, or the patter of his little flying feet as they used to
sound in my ear as he fluttered down the long hall to my study, or the
darling way he used to ran towards me when I held out my arms and
said, "Come, Billy, let Tattah show you the doves," with such an
expectant face, and that little scarlet mouth opened to kiss me--oh,
it is nothing to anybody else, but it is home to