Nay, I did more.
I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle
like a treadmill.'
"`Do you really mean,' I cried, `that you have come right round the world?
Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the west.'
"`My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,' he replied sadly.
`I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.'
"Something in the word `pilgrim' awoke down in the roots
of my ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had
felt about the world, and of something from whence I came.
I looked again at the little pictured lantern at which I had
not looked for fourteen years.
"`My grandmother,' I said in a low tone, `would have said that we
were all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy
home-sickness that forbids us rest.'
"He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift
out beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.
"Then he said, `I think your grandmother was right,' and stood up
leaning on his grassy pole. `I think that must be the reason,'
he said--`the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased.
But I think there is more to be said. I think God has given us
the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land,
for a good reason.
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