“Not at all,” resumed Leacraft, his voice rising with that peculiar English intonation of tenuity, which often animates their sluggist accents, if it does not soon soar into nasal squeaks;--“Not at all. We leave England with not a thing forgotten or lost. The machinery of our greatness is in our history, and in ourselves; the products of industry and art, so far as they are necessary fixtures, stay. What of it--a cathedral, a palace here and there? They often stand for things it would be best for us to forget, and under which perhaps only revolution and violence will make us forget, if we remain as we are. What stirs my imagination, what grows visibly before me”--both Thomsen and Jim watched intently the fervid Englishman, released into a sort of mystic clairvoyance--“is a new land which is a physical unit, which has known no political subdivision, which holds within it no inherited rages, and taunting bitternesses, as these islands do to-day. Let it be Australia, let it be South Africa--though there, I admit, is the memory of a bungle--but we enter it a single people, blended into homogeneity by adversity, and we set about the tremendously interesting task of re-creating England, at least in all things pertaining to her that are great and lovable.” “I fail to see,” said Thomsen, “that the probabilities are that way. On the contrary, freed from the geographical confinement of neighboring islands governed from London, in a new land, Irish, Scotch, English will segregate again, and then scatter, just as might mixed races of birds, who, while they are in the same cage mingle, but when they fly out, fall back into their natural groups, by the most certain of all animal tendencies, that ‘like seeks like.’” “Well, and what of it?” retorted Leacraft. “These elements are together in a new country. It is one. There is no history behind it of subjugation and ill treatment; there can be no reversion to bickerings and recriminations where even the monuments and milestones familiarly associated with injustice have disappeared. Besides, we leave behind the obnoxious, shameless law of entail--at least we shall be free of that disgrace--and at last--but,” he added, his voice again sinking to a pained whisper, “with what a wrench!” “Well, Mr. Leacraft,” spoke up Jim Skaith again, “it’s mair than moving that has to be done. There’s the new land to be bought and settled. There’s getting there, and biding there. There’s schools to be built, and hames and shops, and, it seems to me, with pardon for being so forward, that if it took so many years to make a great city, it’s no fule’s wark to sail ower the seas and pit it up again”; then, after a pause, “An’ it’s never the auld hame.”