“Not at all. Just carelessness of me. But it would be a bad thing if it got out, wouldn’t it? You’d be nabbed and have to stand trial. They’d be sure to convict you, and you’d get ten or twenty years. I say, Walt, old chum, you’re running a deuce of a risk coming here.” “You don’t have to tell me that. I know it well enough. But I’ve been hungry for a sight of the old places and of my father, sister, and friends. You don’t know what it is, Swift, to be an outcast, a man without a country. I don’t suppose I’d felt half so bad if I’d thought I might come back any time without fear of anything; but the knowledge of what was hanging over my head the moment I placed my foot on the soil of the United States made me wild to see the land in which I was born, my native land, the land I love!” “Don’t believe I’d felt that way in your place. I’d felt that I didn’t care a rap for a country where I had been treated in such a shabby manner.” “Did you ever read Edward Everett Hale’s wonderful story, ‘The Man Without a Country’?” “Naw! I don’t read stories. They’re such rot!” “Some are; some are not. The one I speak of seems to me the greatest story ever written, for I am much like the poor wretch in that story. He railed against his native land, cursed it, expressed a wish to never set foot on its shores again. As he was an officer in the regular army, this was regarded as treason. He was tried and condemned to eternal banishment from the United States. He had said that he wished never again to hear the name of his country, and in the decree of his punishment it was directed that never again should he hear it. “He was sent to sea on a vessel of the American Navy. From the time the shores of the United States vanished from his view until his death, he never saw it more. He was transferred from ship to ship, so that always he was kept in foreign waters. Orders were that no one should ever speak to him of the United States. Further than that, no book, newspaper, or printed matter of any sort bearing any information or telling anything about the United States was permitted to reach his hands. “He never received a letter from a single friend in his native land. He was in every way ‘a man without a country.’ What was the result? Soon his feelings began to change. He longed to know something about the land of his birth. What was taking place there? It was all unavailing for him to try to find out. His questions remained unanswered, and finally he ceased to ask them. But always in his eyes there was a look of such unspeakable longing as to touch the heart of every one who saw him.