All these interests had seemed far away from me during the two and a half years over there; but in proportion as I drew near Liverpool that morning they reformed themselves in the mists of the near future, as old memories come back with certain scents and scenes. Not till the damp, smoky haze of the great port was closing in round me did I realize that my more active part in the vast cosmic episode was at an end, and that I had come to the hour I had so often longed for—and was going home. I was going home; and yet, for the minute, at any rate, I was not glad. There is always something painful in the taking up again of forsaken ties, however much we once loved them. It was like a repetition of the effort with which I had renewed my relations with my people. The actual has a way of seizing us in its tentacles and making us feel that it is the only life we ever truly led. There was a time when I seemed to forget that I had ever been anywhere but in the trenches. During the month or two that I was blind I got so used to the condition as to find it strange that I had ever seen. And always, in face of the fierce intensity of the present, the life in New York was remote, shadowy, and dim, as they say the life in prison becomes from its very monotony to those who look back on it after their release. What it really amounted to was that during those two years I seemed to have grown in the size of my mental conceptions. Having been hurled into an existence gigantic, monstrous, in which there were no limits to either the devotion or the cruelty of human beings toward one another, all other ways of living had grown pale and small. If you can imagine yourself swirling through space, riding both zephyrs and tempests equally as a matter of course, you can understand how tame it would seem to be tied down to earth again, to go at nothing more stimulating than a walking pace. Otherwise typified, a lion that has been in a cage, and after two and a half years of free roving in the jungle finds itself returned to the cage again, would probably have the same sinking of the heart as I when I saw the hulk of the _Assiniboia_ loom up before me in the dock. And then came that odd little incident of the nurse to connect me with the past by a new form of excitement. I have to confess that it was excitement largely compounded of wonder and distress. A dull ache told me that sensation was returning to a deadened nerve, and that where I had supposed there was paralysis at least there was going to be reaction and perhaps a pang.