ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOEEIGNTIRS. 55 



iug lamps in the dear old homestead. 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 black- 

 ening 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 town- 

 ward without that aching dread of bulletins that had 

 darkened the July sunshine and twice made the scarlet 

 leaves of October seem stained with blood. I remem- 

 bered with a pang, half-proud, half-painful, how, so many 

 years ago, 1 had walked over the same path and felt 

 round my finger the soft pressm-e of a little hand that 

 was one day to harden with faithful gi'ip 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 treasm-e-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 1 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 revery, and my 

 senses, with reawakened curiosity, ran to the front win- 

 dows 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 W'ls conscious of an immortal soul, and could not but 

 rejoice in the imwaning goodhness of the world into which 

 I had been born without any merit of my own. I thought 



