ad arrived at this point when I asked him the name of his native
town.

The word he spoke came upon me with all the force of a sudden blow. I
had played in the old village as a boy; all my childhood was bound up
in its memories. For many years now I had not heard its name--not
since boyhood days--spoken as he spoke it. Perhaps it was because I
was tired: the office faded away, desk, Headquarters across the
street, boy, officer, business, and all. In their place were the brown
heath I loved, the distant hills, the winding wagon track, the peat
stacks, and the solitary sheep browsing on the barrows. Forgotten the
thirty years, the seas that rolled between, the teeming city! I was at
home again, a child. And there he stood, the boy, with it all in his
dull, absent look. I read it now as plain as the day.

"Hua er et no? Ka do ett fosto hua a sejer?"

It plumped out of me in the broad Jutland dialect I had neither heard
nor spoken in half a lifetime, and so astonished me that I nearly fell
off my chair. Sheep, peat-stacks, cairn, and hills all vanished
together, and in place of the sweet heather there was the table with
the tiresome papers. I reached out yearningly after the heath; I had
not seen it for such a long time,--how long it did seem!--and--but in
the same breath it was all there again in the smile that lighted up
Frands's broad face like a glint of sunlight from a leaden sky.

"Joesses, jou," he laughed, "no ka a da saa grou godt."[1]

[Footnote 1: My exclamation on finding myself so
suddenly translated back to Denmark was an
impatient "Why, don't you understand me?" His
answer was, "Lord, yes, now I do, indeed."]

It was the first honest Danish word he had heard since he came to this
bewildering land. I read it in his face, no longer heavy or dull; saw
it in the way he followed my speech--spelling the words, as it were,
with his own lips, to lose no syllable; caught it in his glad smile as
he went on telling me about his journey, his home, and his
homesickness for the heath, with a breathless kind of haste, as if now
that at last he had a chance, he were afraid it was all a dream, and
that he would presently wake up and find it gone. Then the officer
pulled my sleeve.

He had coughed once or twice, but neither of us had heard him. Now he
held out a paper he had brought, with an apologetic gesture. It was an
agreement Frands was to