Yet somehow he must gather his treasure again, if only between the limits of a year. He must wait for the hoar-frost over the fields and the yellow of winter sun through a black-limbed beech. There were growing things, too, that he must see again—daffodils, foals, and the plums on the south wall. The purple of Michaelmas daisies in a mist, light on a yacht’s sails and the mysterious glimmer of hard ice. Sea-mist that was the ghost of the sea, with the blue-topped mountains rocks in a snowy surf; primrose evening over the sands and the islands of desire. The smell of things, too—warm hay, wet earth, and salt, lilac, syringa, the chill smell of coming snow. The feel of things—turf and sand ... and, rough to the elbows, the stone of the garden wall. The sound of things—bees in the wallflower; plover and gull; the lone owl wheeling round the barn; the roar of the river in flood and the swish of a little tide; the trains in the night where they hung above the sea. And always there were the sounds about the house—the separate voices of door and window and stair, of furniture that never speaks until it is night, of winds in the house that go not in or out, but sleep in dark corners until they stir again.... Perhaps the losing of well-known sounds was the loneliest loss of all, and none so lonely and blank as the loss of a well-known step. Then there were other sounds, as familiar as a voice, that yet in years and years were never traced.... There were doors he wanted to open again, suddenly and alone, and, standing on the threshold, feel all that the empty room contained. That sudden opening of a door was one of the beautiful happenings of life. Even outside you heard the memories speak, creeping through chinks and slipping along the floor. Outside, they seemed to catch you by the throat; but, once the knob was turned, they kissed your cheek. Folks such as he could go blindfold to their homes, and know where they were as soon as they stepped inside. They knew by the feel and smell and sound of things, and by a warm, familiar presence in the air. That was really why he was going home—to open the doors again, and stand, and feel. Afterwards he would go round and handle things ... absorbing them tranquilly, drawing the place in. Satisfied—that was the word he wanted for it all; satisfied, fulfilled ... at rest ... _come back_.... It was surely this great content that helped men to die when it came to the last. After all, it only meant going a little closer to one’s earth. No one need mind if he wasn’t carried away and laid in some foreign spot he had never seen. It wouldn’t seem right to see strange names round you when you awoke, and strange folk rising up at the sound of the Trump. Why, there were some he knew who would be so put about, they would likely never stir their coffin-lids! They’d stick in their graves and say they hadn’t heard, before they’d go cheek-by-jowl with off-comers to the Throne.