“Never. I’ve been in America. A good country; but it never lets you go, and it never gets to be home. All that three-and-forty years I’ve been thinking of the day I’d be going back again.” “And it’s come,” said Jim, his smile suddenly lighting his grey eyes. The old man smiled back “If you weren’t so young I’d say you knew what it was to be homesick,” said he. “I come from Australia,” said Jim, briefly. “Well, well, well!” the priest said. “There’s another great country—only so far away. There’s many a good Irishman there, they tell me.” “Any number of them,” said Jim. “We’ve got one of the best on our place—Murty O’Toole. He taught me to ride.” “Did he so? There were O’Tooles in Wicklow when I was a boy; but sure and they’re all over the world. You’ll be glad to go back, when the time comes?” “Glad!” said Jim, explosively. He laughed. “It’s very jolly, of course, to visit other places. But home’s home, isn’t it, sir?” “Aye,” said the old man. He looked ahead, his eyes misty. “Three-and-forty years I’ve dreamed of it; and now I’m waiting to see the hills of Ireland coming out of the sea, and this last hour seems longer than all the years. Well, well; and they’re all dead, all the people I knew; and I going home to die, like a wornout old dog.” “You’ll live in Ireland many a year yet, sir,” Jim told him, quickly. “No, no; I’m done. ’Tis my heart, and it finished—sure, wouldn’t forty years of work in New York finish any heart!” said the old man, laughing. “But I’m lucky to be getting back to Ireland to die. Did you ever hear, now, of the Sons of Tuireann?” Jim shook his head. “I’m afraid not, sir.” “They were great fighting men, and they had great hardship,” said the priest: “and at the end of all things they were on the sea coming home, dying. And one of them cried out that he saw the hills of home. And the others said, ‘Raise up our heads on your breast till we see Ireland again: and life or death will be the same to us after that.’ So they died. That was a good ending. A man wouldn’t ask better. ’Tis a hard thing, dying in a strange country, but you’d go very easy, once you got home.” He spoke half to himself, so low that the boy hardly caught the words. They stood silently for awhile, looking ahead across the tumbling sea. “I had no right to be talking to you about dying,” the old priest said presently, turning to Jim with a smile that made his face extraordinarily child-like. “Old men get foolish; and my heart’s too big for my body this day, and I getting home. Tell me now—are ye Irish, at all?” “My mother was Irish,” Jim answered. “I’d have said so. What part might she have come from?—and is she with you?” “She died when I was a kiddie,” Jim answered. “She came from Donegal. Father says she always loved it.”