e."

Strickland reached Tahiti about six months after he left
Marseilles. He worked his passage on a sailing vessel that
was making the trip from Auckland to San Francisco, and he
arrived with a box of paints, an easel, and a dozen canvases.
He had a few pounds in his pocket, for he had found work in
Sydney, and he took a small room in a native house outside the town.
I think the moment he reached Tahiti he felt himself at home.
Tiare told me that he said to her once:

"I'd been scrubbing the deck, and all at once a chap said to me:
'Why, there it is.' And I looked up and I saw the outline
of the island. I knew right away that there was the place I'd
been looking for all my life. Then we came near, and I seemed
to recognise it. Sometimes when I walk about it all seems familiar.
I could swear I've lived here before."

"Sometimes it takes them like that," said Tiare. "I've known
men come on shore for a few hours while their ship was taking
in cargo, and never go back. And I've known men who came here
to be in an office for a year, and they cursed the place, and
when they went away they took their dying oath they'd hang
themselves before they came back again, and in six months
you'd see them land once more, and they'd tell you they
couldn't live anywhere else."

Chapter L

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place.
Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they
have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are
strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have
known from childhood or the populous streets in which they
have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend
their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof
among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is
this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the
search for something permanent, to which they may attach
themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the
wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim
beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to
which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home
he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never
seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were
familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

I told Tiare the story of a man I had known at St. Thomas's
Hospital. He was a Jew named Abraham, a blond, rather stout
y