ties of his surroundings with the contented confidence
known only to the intimate friend of a good dog. For Kitchener and I
were already intimate: the cynical philosophy, the sentimental
maundering, the firm resolutions I had poured out in his well-clipped
ear had brought us very close together, and had he chosen to betray my
confidences he could have made a great fool of me, I can tell you.

I can see him now--good old Kitch! With a great black patch over one
roving blue eye and an inky paw, a trim, taut body and a masterful
tail, he travelled more miles than fall to the lot of most bull dogs
and got quite as much good out of them as most of his fellow
travellers. He would have chased an elephant if I had told him to and
carried bones to a cat if I had ordered it done. He is buried next to
Mr. Boffin the poodle, in quiet Stratford, and for many years his
grave was tended--for Harriet never forgot.

Though I had made no formal decision as to where I would go, somewhere
in the back of my brain it had been made for me. That astonishing
young Anglo-Indian had not at that time reminded us that "when you
'ear the East a callin', why, you don't 'eed nothing else" (I quote
from memory and far from libraries) but it was true, for all that, and
I knew the skies that waited for me--the low, kindling stars, the
warm, intimate wind, the very feel of the earth under my feet.

And yet I did not go there, after all. We were bound for England, and
as I travelled up the Devon country and drank in the pure, homelike
landscape and strolled by those incomparable (if occasionally
malarial) cottages, my father's and grandfather's blood stirred in me,
and half consciously, to tell the truth, I found myself on the way to
Oxford. By some miracle of chance my old lodgings were free, and
before I quite realised what I was doing, I was making myself
comfortable in them.

I should have hated to be obliged to explain to my incredulous
American friends what I "did" in those long months, when every week I
planned to be off for the South and every week found me still
lingering by the emerald close, the grey tower, the quiet, formal
place of this backwater of the world. In their sense, of course, I
"did" nothing at all. I watched the youth around me (any one of them I
might have been, had my father lived) I renewed the quiet, cordial
friendships, which, if they never rooted very deep, never, on the
other hand, desiccated and blew away; I wrote many