He felt—­and it is a proof of his weakness—­a certain nameless feeling of content when he had once forced himself into the resolution.  Now at least he had found a helm and a port to strain to.  As his fancy dwelt upon the mission and drew airy pictures of the land, he found to his delight a boyish enthusiasm arising.  Old simple pleasures seemed for the moment dear.  There was a zest for toils and discomforts, a tolerance of failure, which had been aforetime his chief traveller’s heritage.

And then as he came to the ridge where the road passes from Glenavelin to Glen Adler, he stopped as in duty bound to look at the famous prospect.  You stand at the shedding of two streams; behind, the green and woodland spaces of the pastoral Avelin; at the feet, a land of stones and dwarf junipers and naked rifts in the hills, with white-falling waters and dark shadows even at midday.  And then, beyond and afar, the lines of hill-land crowd upon each other till the eye is lost in a mystery of grey rock and brown heather and single bald peaks rising sentinel-like in the waste.  The grey heavens lent a chill eeriness to the dim grey distances; the sharp winds, the forerunners of snow, blew over the moors like blasts from a primeval night.

By an odd vagary of temper the love of these bleak hills blazed up fiercely in his heart.  Never before had he felt so keenly the nameless glamour of his own heritage.  He had not been back six months and yet he had come to accept all things as matters of course, the beauty of the place, its sport, its memories.  Rarely had he felt that intimate joy in it which lies at the bottom of all true souls.  There is a sentiment which old poets have made into songs and called the “Lilt of the Heather,” and which is knit closer to man’s heart than love of wife or kin or his own fair fortune.  It had not come to him in the time of the hills’ glory, but now on the brink of winter the far-off melancholy of the place and its infinite fascination seemed to clutch at his heart-strings.  It was his own land, the place of his fathers; and now he must sever himself from it and carry only a barren memory.

And yet he felt no melancholy.  Rather it was the immortal gaiety of the wanderer, to whom the homeland is dearest as a memory, who pitches his camp by waters of Babylon and yet as ever the old word on his lip, the old song in his ear, and the kindly picture in his heart.  Strange that it is the little races who wander farthest and yet have the eternal home-sickness!  And yet not strange, for to the little peoples, their land, bare and uncouth and unfriendly for the needs of life, must be more the ideal, the dream, than the satisfaction.  The lush countries give corn and wine for their folks, the little bare places afford no more than a spiritual heritage.  Yet spiritual it is, and for two men who in the moment of their extremity will think on meadow, woodland, or placid village, a score will figure the windy hill, the grey lochan, and the mournful sea.