Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/225

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CHAPTER XXIX.

BETWEEN DEVIL AND DEEP SEA.

"O well for him who has a friend,
Or makes a friend where'er he comes,
And loves the world from end to end,
And wanders on from home to home."
Tennyson, The Wanderer.

"Open, candid, and generous, his heart was the constant companion of his hand, and his tongue the artless index of his mind."
Canning.

The doctor stepped ashore at Plymouth a restored man. He spoke that same night to an immense audience assembled in the matchless Guildhall, from whose pictured windows the early settlers of England looked down.

Speeding by train through hedge-bound fields, beneath ancestral oaks and elms, across the garden of England— the fairy-land of Devon—winding beside gleaming sands, beneath beetling cliffs, he paused at length as in a dream—the joy of which only the exile knows—at his native vale of Dawlish.

A lump was in the wanderer's throat, as, perfect stranger, he mounted the sloping hill to right, and gazed on the well-remembered lineaments of the vale that pours its beauties on to the rock-sentinelled sands. He crossed the valley and ascended the embowered hill opposite, moving solemnly, as over the graves of ancestors and