oss-current just off the island, when, amid moans
and groans and other noises, I heard the tearful voice of a sick
passenger asking, 'Is there any hope, stewardess?'

"The train got to Peel as the sun was setting behind the grim old castle
walls, and when I saw the dear little town again I dropped half a tear,
and even felt an insane desire to run out to meet it. Grandfather was at
the station with old 'Caesar' and the pony carriage, and when I had done
kissing him and he had done panting and puffing and talking nonsense, as
if I had been Queen Victoria and the Empress of the French rolled into
one, I could have cried to see how small and feeble he had become since I
went away. We could not get off immediately, for in his simple joy at my
return he was hailing everybody and everybody was hailing him, and the
dear old Pharisee was sounding his trumpet so often in the market-place,
that he might have glory of men, that I thought we should never get up to
Glenfaba that night. When we did so at length the old aunties were
waiting at the gate, and then he broke into exclamations again. 'Hasn't
she grown tall? Look at her! Hasn't she, now?' Whereupon the aunties took
up their parable with, 'Well, well! Aw, well! Aw, well now! Well, ye
navar!' So that by the time I got through I had kissed everybody a dozen
times, and was as red over the eyes as a grouse.

"Then we went into the house, and for the first five minutes I couldn't
tell what had come over the old place to make it look so small and mean.
It was just as if the walls of the rooms had been the bellows of a
concertina and somebody had suddenly shut them. But there was the long
clock clucking away on the landing, and there was Sir Thomas Traddles
purring on the hearth-rug, and there were the same plates on the dresser,
and the same map of Africa over the fireplace, with a spot of red ink
where my father died.

"The moon was glistening on the sea when I went to bed that night, and
when I got up in the morning the sun was shining on it, and a crow cut
across my window cawing, and I heard grandfather humming to himself on
the path below. And after my long spell in London, and my railway journey
of the day before, it was the same as if I had fallen asleep in a gale on
the high seas and awakened in a quiet harbour somewhere.

"So here I am, back at Glenfaba, in my old little room with my old little
bed, and everything exactly as it used to be; and I begin to believe that
w