't make no haste," he called to me; "I'll keep
within call. Joanna lays right up there in the far corner o' the field.
There used to be a path led to the place. I always knew her well. I was
out here to the funeral."

I found the path; it was touching to discover that this lonely spot was
not without its pilgrims. Later generations will know less and less of
Joanna herself, but there are paths trodden to the shrines of solitude
the world over,--the world cannot forget them, try as it may; the feet
of the young find them out because of curiosity and dim foreboding;
while the old bring hearts full of remembrance. This plain anchorite had
been one of those whom sorrow made too lonely to brave the sight of men,
too timid to front the simple world she knew, yet valiant enough to live
alone with her poor insistent human nature and the calms and passions of
the sea and sky.

The birds were flying all about the field; they fluttered up out of the
grass at my feet as I walked along, so tame that I liked to think they
kept some happy tradition from summer to summer of the safety of nests
and good fellowship of mankind. Poor Joanna's house was gone except
the stones of its foundations, and there was little trace of her flower
garden except a single faded sprig of much-enduring French pinks, which
a great bee and a yellow butterfly were befriending together. I drank at
the spring, and thought that now and then some one would follow me from
the busy, hard-worked, and simple-thoughted countryside of the mainland,
which lay dim and dreamlike in the August haze, as Joanna must have
watched it many a day. There was the world, and here was she with
eternity well begun. In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there
is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret
happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour
or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of
history they may belong.

But as I stood alone on the island, in the sea-breeze, suddenly
there came a sound of distant voices; gay voices and laughter from a
pleasure-boat that was going seaward full of boys and girls. I knew, as
if she had told me, that poor Joanna must have heard the like on many
and many a summer afternoon, and must have welcomed the good cheer
in spite of hopelessness and winter weather, and all the sorrow and
disappointment in the world.

XVI. The Great Expedition

MRS. TODD never by