med in a questioning way, he
opened his heart and the secret of his present happiness.

He was a native of the district, born at a farmhouse of which his father
in succession to his grandfather had been the tenant. It was a small
farm of only eighty-five acres, and as his father could make no more
than a bare livelihood out of it, he eventually gave it up when my
informant was but three years old, and selling all he had, emigrated to
Australia. Nine years later he died, leaving a numerous family poorly
provided for; the home was broken up and boys and girls had to go out
and face the world. They had somehow all got on very well, and his
brothers and sisters were happy enough out there, Australians in mind,
thoroughly persuaded that theirs was the better land, the best country
in the world, and with no desire to visit England. He had never felt
like that; somehow his father's feeling about the old country had taken
such a hold of him that he never outlived it--never felt at home in
Australia, however successful he was in his affairs. The home feeling
had been very strong in his father; his greatest delight was to sit of
an evening with his children round him and tell them of the farm and the
old farm-house where he was born and had lived so many years, and where
some of them too had been born. He was never tired of talking of it,
of taking them by the hand, as it were, and leading them from place to
place, to the stream, the village, the old stone church, the meadows and
fields and hedges, the deep shady lanes, and, above all, to the dear
old ivied house with its gables and tall chimneys. So many times had
his father described it that the old place was printed like a map on his
mind, and was like a picture which kept its brightness even after the
image of his boyhood's home in Australia had become faded and pale. With
that mental picture to guide him he believed that he could go to that
angle by the porch where the flycatchers bred every year and find their
nest; where in the hedge the blackberries were most abundant; where the
elders grew by the stream from which he could watch the moorhens and
watervoles; that he knew every fence, gate, and outhouse, every room and
passage in the old house. Through all his busy years that picture never
grew less beautiful, never ceased its call, and at last, possessed of
sufficient capital to yield him a modest income for the rest of his
life, he came home. What he was going to do in En