you love the South less, but
that you love home more.

"I wonder if we will ever go on such a trip as this again?" you say to
your companion.

"I don't believe so," he replies.

"It doesn't seem now as though we should," you return. "But do you
remember?--we talked the same way when we were coming home before. What
will it be two years hence?"

"True," he says. "And of course there's Conan Doyle. He always thinks
he's never going to do it any more. But in a year or so Sherlock Holmes
pops out again, drawn by Freddy Steele, all over the cover of
'Collier's.' Not that your stuff is as good as Doyle's, but that the
general case is somewhat parallel."

"Doyle has killed Holmes," you put in.

"Yes," he agrees, "and several times you've almost killed me."

Then as the train speeds scornfully through Newark, without stopping, he
catches sight of a vast concrete building--a warehouse of some kind,
apparently.

"Look!" he cries. "Isn't it wonderful?"

"That building?"

"Not the building itself. The thought that we don't have to get off here
and go through it. Think what it would be like if we were on our
travels! There would be a lot of citizens in frock coats. Probably the
mayor would be there, too. They would drive us to that building, and
take us in, and then they would cry if we refused to go to the
fourteenth floor, where they keep the dried prunes."

The train slips across the Jersey meadows and darts into the tunnel.

"Now," he remarks hopefully, "we are really going to get home--if this
tunnel doesn't drop in on us."

And when the train has emerged from the tunnel, and you have emerged
from the train, he says: "Now there's no doubt that we are going to get
home--unless we are smashed up in a taxi, on the way."

And when the taxi stops at your front door, and you bid him farewell
before he continues on his way to his own front door, he says: "Now
you're going to get home for sure--unless the elevator drops."

And when the elevator has not dropped, but has transported you in safety
to the door of your apartment, and you have searched out the old key,
and have unlocked the door, and entered, and found happiness within,
then you wonder to yourself as I once heard a little boy wonder, when he
had gone out of his own yard, and had found a number of large cans of
paint, and had upset them on himself:

"I have a very happy home," he said, reflectively. "I wonder why I don't
seem to stay around it more?"