CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 49 



the bare boughs etched with a touch beyond Rembrandt 

 by the same unconscious artist on the smooth page of 

 snow ! If I turned round, through dusky tree-gaps came 

 the first twinkle of evening lamps in the dear old home 

 stead. On Corey s hill I could see these tiny pharoses of 

 love and home and sweet domestic thoughts flash out one 

 by one across the blackening salt-meadow between. How 

 much has not kerosene added to the cheerfulness of our 

 evening landscape ! A pair of night-herons flapped heavily 

 over me toward the hidden river. The war was ended. I 

 might walk townward without that aching dread of 

 bulletins that had darkened the July sunshine, and twice 

 made the scarlet leaves of October seemed stained with 

 blood. I remembered with a pang, half proud, half 

 painful, how so many years ago I had walked over the 

 same path and felt round my finger the soft pressure of 

 a little hand that was one day to harden with faithful 

 grip of sabre. On how many paths, leading to how many 

 homes where proud Memory does all she can to fill up 

 the fireside gaps with shining shapes, must not men be 

 walking in just such pensive mood as I ? Ah, young 

 heroes, safe in immortal youth as those of Homer, you 

 at least carried your ideal hence untarnished ! It is locked 

 for you beyond moth or rust in the treasure-chamber of 

 Death. 



Is not a country, I thought, that has had such as they in 

 it, that could give such as they a brave joy in dying for it, 

 worth something, then ? And as I felt more and more the 

 soothing magic of evening s cool palm upon my temples, as 

 my fancy came home from its reverie, and niy senses, with 

 reawakened curiosity, ran to the front windows again from 

 the viewless closet of abstraction, and felt a strange charm 

 in finding the old tree and shabby fence still there under 

 the travesty of falling night, nay, were conscious of an 

 unsuspected newness in familiar stars and the fading 

 outlines of hills my earliest horizon, I was conscious of an 

 immortal soul, and could not but rejoice in the unwaning 

 goodliness of the world into which I had been born without 



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