arising. Old simple pleasures seemed for
the moment dear. There was a zest for toils and discomforts, a
tolerance of failure, which had been aforetime his chief traveller's
heritage.

And then as he came to the ridge where the road passes from Glenavelin
to Glen Adler, he stopped as in duty bound to look at the famous
prospect. You stand at the shedding of two streams; behind, the green
and woodland spaces of the pastoral Avelin; at the feet, a land of
stones and dwarf junipers and naked rifts in the hills, with
white-falling waters and dark shadows even at midday. And then, beyond
and afar, the lines of hill-land crowd upon each other till the eye is
lost in a mystery of grey rock and brown heather and single bald peaks
rising sentinel-like in the waste. The grey heavens lent a chill
eeriness to the dim grey distances; the sharp winds, the forerunners of
snow, blew over the moors like blasts from a primeval night.

By an odd vagary of temper the love of these bleak hills blazed up
fiercely in his heart. Never before had he felt so keenly the nameless
glamour of his own heritage. He had not been back six months and yet he
had come to accept all things as matters of course, the beauty of the
place, its sport, its memories. Rarely had he felt that intimate joy in
it which lies at the bottom of all true souls. There is a sentiment
which old poets have made into songs and called the "Lilt of the
Heather," and which is knit closer to man's heart than love of wife or
kin or his own fair fortune. It had not come to him in the time of the
hills' glory, but now on the brink of winter the far-off melancholy of
the place and its infinite fascination seemed to clutch at his
heart-strings. It was his own land, the place of his fathers; and now
he must sever himself from it and carry only a barren memory.

And yet he felt no melancholy. Rather it was the immortal gaiety of the
wanderer, to whom the homeland is dearest as a memory, who pitches his
camp by waters of Babylon and yet as ever the old word on his lip, the
old song in his ear, and the kindly picture in his heart. Strange that
it is the little races who wander farthest and yet have the eternal
home-sickness! And yet not strange, for to the little peoples, their
land, bare and uncouth and unfriendly for the needs of life, must be
more the ideal, the dream, than the satisfaction. The lush countries
give corn and wine for their folks, the little bare places afford no
more th