There was, of course, not one. Moreover, the little hut beside the pines, as Philippe’s fixed gaze at last slowly apprehended it, revealed itself most plainly to be wrought of no dear picturesque dark timbers, but of galvanised iron only, pale and ugly. The old man roused himself out of his waking dream. He sighed. Ah, yes! it might certainly all be very like, but it was not the same—it was not Home! There are times when similarities do but accentuate a difference; and a wave of the most bitter yearning and homesickness overwhelmed poor Philippe now as he sat there in the sun.
O for the Real Things—for the lake that was not salt, for the streamlet that flowed from snows, for the grass all full of flowers! O for the old Home landscape, for the old, familiar speech, for the dear, the true, the real, the right, old ways! Philippe had not been in Switzerland for half a century; his youthful manhood, his prime, his age, had all been passed in New Zealand; and he was in general extremely proud of his adopted country, of her beauty, her resources, her rapid growth, her happy and spring-like prospects. But now, on this radiant morning, whether it was the result of his years, of his illness, or of some rare climatic quality of the day, it seemed to him that he had made a great mistake, that he had been somehow duped, defrauded, ruined; that he had been made to spend all his strength, all his life, in the wrong place. And for the right one, for that far-away lost country, of his childhood, of his early strength, of his first and only love, a desperate longing fed by all these strangely reawakened memories and associations grew and grew, until it over-
