“Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked out eastward where the road fell away below us.  The sunset sky was a vault of rich velvet, fading away into mauve and silver round the edges of the dark mountain amphitheatre; and between us and the ravine below rose up out of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we call Green Finger.  Of a queer volcanic colour, and wrinkled all over with what looks undecipherable writing, it hung there like a Babylonian pillar or needle.

“The man silently stretched out his rake in that direction, and before he spoke I knew what he meant.  Beyond the great green rock in the purple sky hung a single star.

“`A star in the east,’ he said in a strange hoarse voice like one of our ancient eagles’. `The wise men followed the star and found the house.  But if I followed the star, should I find the house?’

“`It depends perhaps,’ I said, smiling, `on whether you are a wise man.’  I refrained from adding that he certainly didn’t look it.

“`You may judge for yourself,’ he answered. `I am a man who left his own house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.’

“`It certainly sounds paradoxical,’ I said.

“`I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving about the room,’ he continued, `and all the time I knew they were walking and talking in another house thousands of miles away, under the light of different skies, and beyond the series of the seas.  I loved them with a devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but unattainable.  Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable:  but I seemed like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a testimony.  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.’