of it, he first frowned and then laughed.

He walked a little way, cresting the rising ground, till he came to an
open space with an unbroken view over the level country to Barnet. Here,
the last of the houses that could claim to belong to the great London
army stood alone in its own considerable space of ground. It was a very
old-fashioned house; it had been half farmhouse, half hall, in the
latter days of the last century, and the dull red brick of its walls,
and the dull red tiles of its roof showed warm and attractive through
the green of the encircling trees. There was a small garden in front,
planted with pine trees, through which a winding path led up to the low
porch of the dwelling. Behind the house a very large garden extended, a
great garden which he knew so well, with its lengths of undulating
russet orchard wall, and its divisions into flower garden and fruit
garden and vegetable garden, and the field beyond, where successive
generations of ponies fed, and where he had loved to play in boyhood.

He rested his hand on the upper rim of the garden gate, and looked with
curious affection at the inscription in faded gold letters that ran
along it. The inscription read, 'Blarulfsgarth,' and he remembered ever
so far back asking what that inscription meant, and being told that it
was Icelandic, and that it meant the Garth, or Farm, of the Blue Wolf.
And he remembered, too, being told the tale from which the name came, a
tale that was related of an ancestor of his, real or imaginary, who had
lived and died centuries ago in a grey northern land. It was curious
that, as he stood there, so many recollections of his childhood should
come back to him. He was a man, and not a very young man, when he last
laid his hand upon that gate, and yet it seemed to him now as if he had
left it when he was quite a little child, and was returning now for the
first time with the feelings of a man to the place where he had passed
his infancy.

His hand slipped down to the latch, but he did not yet lift it. He still
lingered while he turned for a moment and looked over the wide extent of
level smiling country that stretched out and away before him. The last
time he had looked on that sweep of earth he was going off to seek
adventure in a far land, in a new world. He had thought himself a broken
man; he was sick of England; his thoughts in their desperation had
turned to the country which was only a name to him, the country where he
w