Old-Homesickness--The Ideal and the Real--A beautiful but perilous woman with a past--The Garden of Eden a Montreal ice-palace--Confused mountain of family luggage--Poplars for lances--Miraculous crimson comforters--Rivers of human gore-- Curling mustachios and nothing to do--Odd behavior of grown people--Venus, the populace, and the MacDaniels--The happiness to die in Paris--Lived alone with her constellations--"O'Brien's Belt"--A hotel of peregrinations-- Sitting up late--Attempted assassination--My murderer--An old passion reawakened--Italian shells and mediaeval sea- anemones--If you were in the Garden of Eden--An umbrella full of napoleons--Was Byron an Esquimau? No doubt my father had grown fond of England during his four years' residence there. Except for its profits he had not, indeed, liked the consular work; but even that had given zest to his several excursions from it, which were in themselves edifying and enjoyable. The glamour of tradition, too, had wrought upon him, and he had made friends and formed associations. Such influences, outwardly gentle and unexacting, take deeper hold of the soul than we are at the time aware. They show their strength only when we test them by removing ourselves from their physical sphere. Accordingly, though he looked forward with pleasure to leaving England for the Continent, he was no sooner on the farther side of the narrow seas than he began to be conscious of discomfort, which was only partly bodily or sensible. An unacknowledged homesickness afflicted him--an Old-Homesickness, rather than a yearning for America. He may have imagined that it was America that he wanted, but, when at last we returned there, he still looked back towards England. As an ideal, America was still, and always, foremost in his heart; and his death was hastened partly by his misgiving, caused by the civil war, lest her best days were past. But something there was in England that touched a deep, kindred chord in him which responded to nothing else. America might be his ideal home, but his real home was England, and thus he found himself, in the end, with no home at all outside of the boundaries of his domestic circle. A subconscious perception of this predicament, combined with his gradually failing health, led him to say, in a moment of frank self-communion, "Since this earthly life is to come to an end, I do not try to be contented, but weary of it while it lasts."