“Going home is the end of all journeys,” said Abe as they tramped along.  “Did it ever occur to you that every living creature has its home?  The fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the beasts of the field and forest, the creepers in the grass, all go home.  Most of them turn toward it when the day wanes.  The call of home is the one voice heard and respected all the way down the line of life.  And, ye know, the most wonderful and mysterious thing in nature is the power that fool animals have to go home through great distances, like the turtle that swam from the Bay of Biscay to his home off Van Dieman’s Land.  Somehow coming over in a ship he had blazed a trail through the pathless deep more than ten thousand miles long.  It’s the one miraculous gift—­the one call that’s irresistible.  Don’t you hear it now?  I never lie down in the darkness without thinking of home when I am away.”

“And it’s hard to change your home when you’re wonted to it,” said Harry.

“Yes, it’s a little like dying when you pull up the roots and move.  It’s been hard on your folks.”

This remark brought them up to the greatest of mysteries.  They tramped in silence for a moment.  Abe broke in upon it with these words: 

“I reckon there must be another home somewhere to go to after we have broke the last camp here and a kind of a bird’s compass to help us find it.  I reckon we’ll hear the call of it as we grow older.”

He stopped and took off his hat and looked up at the stars and added: 

“If it isn’t so I don’t see why the long procession of life keeps harping on this subject of home.  I think I see the point of the whole thing.  It isn’t the place or the furniture that makes it home, but the love and peace that’s in it.  By and by our home isn’t here any more.  It has moved.  Our minds begin to beat about in the undiscovered countries looking for it.  Somehow we get it located—­each man for himself.”

For another space they hurried along without speaking.

“I tell you, Harry, whatever a large number of intelligent folks have agreed upon for some generations is so—­if they have been allowed to do their own thinking,” said Abe.  “It’s about the only wisdom there is.”

He had sounded the keynote of the new Democracy.

“There are some who think that Reason is the only guide but in the one problem of going home it don’t compare with the turtle’s wisdom,” Abe added.  “His head isn’t bigger than a small apple.  But I reckon the scientist can’t teach him anything about navigation.  Reminds me o’ Steve Nuckles.  His head is full of ignorance but he’ll know how to get home when the time comes.”

“My stars!  How we’re hurrying!” Harry exclaimed at length.

“I didn’t realize it—­I’m so taken up with the thought of getting back,” said Abe.  “It’s as if my friends had a rope around me and were pulling it.”

So under the lights of heaven, speaking in the silence of the night, of impenetrable mysteries, they journeyed on toward the land of plenty.