It was during convalescence that it occurred to me I was nearing thirty, and that if I meant to live in America all my life, it was time to become naturalized. And this thought caused me to reflect on the question of going home. My sister, with her children, passed through New York about this time, returning from South Australia, where her husband was Governor, and it was at dinner in my employer’s house, where he had invited them, that the longing to return to England suddenly declared itself. To find myself among relatives who called me by the unfamiliar childhood name, woke English memories, English values, and brought back the English atmosphere once more. My mother was still alive.... I remember that dinner well. My sister brought a tame little Mexican monkey with her. A man, also, called to ask Mr. Speyer for help, and when I went to interview him in the hall, his long story included a reference to something Mr. Dodge, he declared, had done for him. “Mr. Dodge gave me this,” he said, and promptly scooped one eye out of its socket and showed it to me lying in the palm of his hand. The glass eye, the monkey, remain associated in my mind still with the rather poignant memories of forgotten English days my sister’s visit stirred to life, and with my own emotions as I reflected upon the idea of going home at last. A chance meeting, again, worked its spell. I had felt that half a universe separated me from the world in which my relatives lived, but after they had gone I began to realize various things I had not appreciated before. New York, I saw, could furnish no true abiding city for my soul which, though vagabond, yet sought something more than its appalling efficiency could ever give. What did I miss? I could name it now, but I hardly named it then perhaps. I was always hungry there, but with a hunger not of the body merely. The hunger, however, was real, often it was devastating. With such a lop-sided development as mine had been, my immaturity, no doubt, was still glaring. The sense of failure, I know, at any rate, was very strong. My relatives had been travelling, and they reflected a colour of other lands that called to me. Thought and longing now turned to an older world. There were ancient wonders, soft with age, mature with a beauty and tenderness only timelessness can give, that caught me on the raw with a power no Yosemites, Niagaras, or Grand Canyons could hope to imitate. Size has its magic, but size bludgeons the imagination, rather than feeds it. My heart turned suddenly across the sea. I loved the big woods, but behind, beyond the woods, great Egypt lay ablaze.... I talked things over with the Old Man of Visions; he advised me to go home. “See your mother before she dies,” he urged. “I cannot come with you, but I may follow you.” He added: “I shall miss you,” then dropped into poetry, as he always did when he was moved....