th great solemnity. "Let's go
there!"

* * * * *

I have wondered since if this same young man may not have been the one
who, returning to the St. Charles Hotel in the early hours of that sad
Ash Wednesday morning, was asked by the clerk, who gave him his key,
whether he wished to leave a call.

"What day's this?" he inquired.

"Wednesday," said the clerk.

"All ri'," replied the other, moving toward the elevator. "Call me
Saturday."

CHAPTER LX

FINALE

Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night and day
The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away;
And come I may, but go I must, and if men ask you why,
You may put the blame on the stars and the sun and the white road and
the sky!

--GERALD GOULD.

It is good to look about the world; but always there comes a time when
the restless creature, man, having yielded to the call of the seas and
the stars and the sky, and gone a-journeying, begins to think of home
again. Even were home a less satisfactory, a less happy place than it
is, he would be bound to think of it after so long a journey as that
upon which my companion and I had spent so many months. For, just as it
is necessary for a locomotive to go every so often for an overhauling,
so it is necessary for the traveler to return to headquarters. The
fastenings of his wardrobe trunk are getting loose, and the side of it
has been stove in; his heels are running down in back, his watch needs
regulating, his umbrella-handle is coming loose, he is running out of
notebooks and pencils and has broken a blade of his knife in trying to
open a bottle with it (because he left his corkscrew in a hotel
somewhere along the way). His fountain pen has sprung a leak and
spoiled a waistcoat, his razors are dull, his strop is nicked, and he
has run out of the kind of cigarettes and cigars he likes. One lens of
his spectacles has gotten scratched, his mail has ceased to reach him,
his light suits are spotted, baggy and worn, and his winter suits are
becoming too heavy for comfort as the spring advances. His neckties are
getting stringy, he has hangnails and a cough; he never could fix his
own hangnails, and he cannot cure his cough because the bottle of
glycerine and wild cherry provided for just such an emergency by the
loved ones at home, got broken on the trip from Jacksonville to
Montgomery, and went dribbling down through the trunk, r