relics of early youth, to the old church amongst the trees, out by the lych-gate to the rectory, reposing, as when first he awoke to consciousness of being, beneath the giant trees in that fairy hollow.
He dare not move forward. His heart was too full for speech with strangers, where parents' voices, long since hushed, had so lovingly sounded. There hour after hour he sat, envying the passing farmer and rustic children, who, seeming not to realize that they dwelt in a paradise upon earth, eyed him curiously.
When the warm beams of the July sun were beating life into the decaying walls of old Exeter, he passed, one Sunday morning, up the well-remembered winding hill from the station to the Close in which stood the ancient Norman pile. Under its time-scarred portal, from whose countless niches the sculptured figures had departed—as had the faces he once knew from the streets—alone in the venerable nave he knelt as in another world. On more than one great tablet of brass he read the names of school-boy chums, fallen in battle, or distinguished in State.
Slowly he moved in London, lost in its crowds; out to the docks, where college-mates, who had promised to impress the age, spent their lives in a desert of vice and crime that gathers around the great store-houses of the world.
Into the Black Country, seeking vanished faces, he wandered, where strong men stalked the street craving work that, half the year, never came. Thinking of scenes afar, of thousands of unpeopled miles in his adopted country, wasting for lack of people to till it, his heart sank within him. Gaunt-looking men, vouched for by clergy and employers, followed him, as he moved from thronged halls in which he had been telling of the
