They stayed away nearly two years. Douglass revisited England and Ireland and Scotland. He missed the people with whom he had worked in the old days, but their children received him royally. The two sisters, Anna and Ellen Richardson, who forty-five years before had written to Thomas Auld offering to buy his “runaway slave,” were still living. Helen kissed their withered cheeks and breathed her thanks. They set up housekeeping in Paris, watched the ships sail from Marseilles, and climbed the old amphitheater in Arles. In Genoa Douglass was drawn, more than to anything else, to Paganini’s violin exhibited in the museum. This was Douglass’ favorite instrument. He had even learned to play it a little. “We’ll buy a violin while we’re here,” Helen promised. “It won’t be Paganini’s, but we’ll get an instrument.” “Well, it won’t sound like Paganini’s, either!” Under the Italian sunshine that was enough to make them laugh. Pisa and then Rome, Naples and Pompeii, Sicily. Then eagerly they turned toward the rising sun--Egypt, the Suez Canal, Libyan deserts, the Nile flowing through Africa. Douglass’ heart beat fast. Sandy’s face came before him--Sandy and the bit of African dust he had held in his hand so long ago. Perhaps strength had flowed into him from that dust. They made the voyage from Naples to Port Said in four days. The weather was perfect, and at dawn they found themselves face to face with old Stromboli, whose cone-shaped summit rises almost perpendicularly from the sea. “Nothing in my American experience,” Douglass claimed, “ever gave me such a deep sense of unearthly silence, such a sense of fast, profound, unbroken sameness and solitude, as did this passage through the Suez Canal, moving smoothly and noiselessly between two spade-built banks of yellow sand, watched over by the jealous care of England and France. We find here, too, the motive and mainspring of English Egyptian occupation and of English policy. On either side stretches a sandy desert, to which the eye, even with the aid of the strongest field-glass, can find no limit but the horizon; land where neither tree, shrub nor vegetation of any kind, nor human habitation breaks the view. All is flat, broad, silent and unending solitude. There appears occasionally, away in the distance, a white line of life which only makes the silence and solitude more pronounced. It is a line of flamingoes, the only bird to be seen in the desert, making us wonder what they find upon which to subsist.