This Human Loss Is Felt Even More In The Case Of A Return To Some Small Centre, A Village Or Hamlet Where We Knew Every One, And Our Intimacy With The People Has Produced The Sense Of Being One In Blood With Them.

It is greatest of all when we return to a childhood's or boyhood's home.

Many writers have occupied themselves with this mournful theme, and I imagine that a person of the proper Amiel-like tender and melancholy moralizing type of mind, by using his own and his friends' experiences, could write a charmingly sad and pretty book on the subject.

The really happy returns of this kind must be exceedingly rare. I am almost surprised to think that I am able to recall as many as two, but they hardly count, as in both instances the departure or exile from home happens at so early a time of life that no recollections of the people survived - nothing, in fact, but a vague mental picture of the place. One was of a business man I knew in London, who lost his early home in a village in the Midlands, as a boy of eight or nine years of age, through the sale of the place by his father, who had become impoverished. The boy was trained to business in London, and when a middle-aged man, wishing to retire and spend the rest of his life in the country, he revisited his native village for the first time, and dicovered to his joy that he could buy back the old home. He was, when I last saw him, very happy in its possession.

The other case I will relate more fully, as it is a very curious one, and came to my knowledge in a singular way.

At a small station near Eastleigh a man wearing a highly pleased expression on his face entered the smoking-carriage in which I was travelling to London. Putting his bag on the rack, he pulled out his pipe and threw himself back in his seat with a satisfied air; then, looking at me and catching my eye, he at once started talking. I had my newspaper, but seeing him in that overflowing mood I responded readily enough, for I was curious to know why he appeared so happy and who and what he was. Not a tradesman nor a bagman, and not a farmer, though he looked like an open-air man; nor could I form a guess from his speech and manner as to his native place. A robust man of thirty-eight or forty, with blue eyes and a Saxon face, he looked a thorough Englishman, and yet he struck me as most un-English in his lively, almost eager manner, his freedom with a stranger, and something, too, in his speech. From time to time his face lighted up, when, looking to the window, his eyes rested on some pretty scene - a glimpse of stately old elm trees in a field where cattle were grazing, of the vivid green valley of a chalk stream, the paler hills beyond, the grey church tower or spire of some tree-hidden village.

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