e seas. I loved them with a devouring love,
because they seemed not only distant but unattainable.
Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable:
but I seemed like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off
their dust from my feet for a testimony. Nay, I did more.
I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle
like a treadmill.'

"`Do you really mean,' I cried, `that you have come right round the world?
Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the west.'

"`My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,' he replied sadly.
`I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.'

"Something in the word `pilgrim' awoke down in the roots
of my ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had
felt about the world, and of something from whence I came.
I looked again at the little pictured lantern at which I had
not looked for fourteen years.

"`My grandmother,' I said in a low tone, `would have said that we
were all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy
home-sickness that forbids us rest.'

"He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift
out beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.

"Then he said, `I think your grandmother was right,' and stood up
leaning on his grassy pole. `I think that must be the reason,'
he said--`the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased.
But I think there is more to be said. I think God has given us
the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land,
for a good reason.'

"`I dare say,' I said. `What reason?'

"`Because otherwise,' he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the abyss,
`we might worship that.'

"`What do you mean?' I demanded.

"`Eternity,' he said in his harsh voice, `the largest of the idols--
the mightiest of the rivals of God.'

"`You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,' I suggested.

"`I mean,' he said with increasing vehemence, `that if there be a house
for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge,
or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post
and a hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it,
and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot
might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries,
that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything.
And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had
a real green lamp-post after all.'