"Il y a toujours des vents brulants, qui passent sur l'ame de l'homme, et la dessechant. La priere est la rosee qui la rafraichit." And, again,-- "Dieu sait mieux que vous ce dont vous avez besoin, et c'est pour cela qu'il veut que vous le lui demandiez; car Dieu est lui-meme votre premier besoin, et prier Dieu, c'est commencer a posseder Dieu." The sirocco of sorrow had fanned its hot breath over my soul; but, no grateful spring shower had cooled it through prayer. God, certainly, knows better than we what we should desire; but why does He not instruct us in His wishes? Perhaps you think this all milk-and-watery talk, and that I do not mean what I say? But I do. Even those people whom you might think the most unlikely persons to have such thoughts, will have these reflections, so why not speak of them? Some, I know, believe that all religious conversation should be strictly tabooed in any reference to secular matters. But it seems to me a very delicate faith that will only stand an airing once a week, like your church services on Sundays! _I_ have thought of such things, and I'm not ashamed to mention them. Acting on my mind at the same time--in concert with these religious doubts, and the consciousness of my unlucky fortunes--was a strong feeling of home-sickness, which grew and grew with greater intensity as the months rolled by. I got so miserable, that, I felt with Shelley-- "I could lie down, like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear!" For what profit did this warring against destiny bring me? Nothing-- nothing, but the "vanity and vexation of spirit," which a more believing soul than mine had apostrophised in agony, ages before I was born. You may not credit the fact of the Swiss mountaineers pining of what is called "Home-woe," when banished from their beloved glaciers, the same as Cyrus's legions suffered from _nostalgia_; and, may put down the Frenchman's _maladie du pays_, which some expatriated communists are probably experiencing now in New Caledonia, to blatant sentimentality; but they are each and all true expositions of feeling. We Englishmen are generally prosaic; but some of us have known the terrible yearning which this home-sickness produces in us in foreign lands. The Devonshire shepherd will weep over the recollections which a little daisy will bring back to him of the old country of his childhood, when standing beneath an Australian gum tree. I have seen a Scotchman in America cherish a thistle, as if it were the rarest of plants, from its native associations; and I know of a potted shamrock which was brought all the way across the ocean in an emigrant ship, by an Irish miner, and which now adorns the window of a veranda-fronted cottage at the Pittsburgh mines in Pennsylvania!