With that parting shot he gathered up the lines and drove off, while I leaned up against the door shaking with a laughter which my sister in no wise shared with me.  Poor Bee!  Things like that jar her so that she can’t get any amusement out of them.  To her it was terrifying impudence.  To me it was a heart-to-heart talk with a London cabby!

Oh, the sweet viciousness of that “I wish it had rained!” I wonder if that man beats his wife, or if he just converses with her as he does with a recreant fare!  Anyway, I loved him.

But if I have discovered nothing else in the brief time since I left my native land, it is worth while to realize the truth of all the poetry and song written on foreign shores about home.

To one accustomed to travel only in America, and to feel at home with all the different varieties of one’s countrymen, such sentiments are no more than vers de societe. But now I know what Heimweh is—­the home-pain.  I can understand that the Swiss really die of it sometimes.  The home-pain!  Neuralgia, you know, and most other acute pains, attack only one set of nerves.  But Heimweh hurts all over.  There is not a muscle of the body, nor the most remote fibre of the brain, nor a tissue of the heart that does not ache with it.  You can’t eat.  You can’t sleep.  You can’t read or write or talk.  It begins with the protoplasm of your soul—­and reaches forward to the end of time, and aches every step of the way along.  You want to hide your face in a pillow away from everybody and do nothing but weep, but even that does not cure.  It seems to be too private to help materially.  The only thing I can recommend is to “bust out.”

Homesickness is an inexplicable thing.  I have heard brides relate how it attacked them unmercifully and without cause in the midst of their honeymoon.  Girl students, whose sole aim in life has been to come abroad to study, and who, in finally coming, have fondly dreamed that the gates of Paradise had swung open before their delighted eyes, have been among its earliest and most acutely afflicted victims.  No success, no realized ambitions ward it off.  Like death, it comes to high and low alike.  One woman, whose name became famous with her first concert, told me that she spent the first year over here in tears.  Nothing that friends can do, no amount of kindness or hospitality avails as a preventive.  You can take bromides and cure insomnia.  You can take chloroform, and enough of it will prevent seasickness, but nothing avails for Heimweh.  And like pride, “let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”  I have been in the midst of an animated, recital of how homesick I had been the day before, ridiculing myself and my malady with unctuous freedom, when suddenly Billy’s little face would seem to rise out of the flowers on the dinner-table, or the patter of his little flying feet as they used to sound in my ear as he fluttered down