They had somehow all got on very well, and his brothers and sisters were happy enough out there, Australians in mind, thoroughly persuaded that theirs was the better land, the best country in the world, and with no desire to visit England.  He had never felt like that; somehow his father’s feeling about the old country had taken such a hold of him that he never outlived it—­never felt at home in Australia, however successful he was in his affairs.  The home feeling had been very strong in his father; his greatest delight was to sit of an evening with his children round him and tell them of the farm and the old farm-house where he was born and had lived so many years, and where some of them too had been born.  He was never tired of talking of it, of taking them by the hand, as it were, and leading them from place to place, to the stream, the village, the old stone church, the meadows and fields and hedges, the deep shady lanes, and, above all, to the dear old ivied house with its gables and tall chimneys.  So many times had his father described it that the old place was printed like a map on his mind, and was like a picture which kept its brightness even after the image of his boyhood’s home in Australia had become faded and pale.  With that mental picture to guide him he believed that he could go to that angle by the porch where the flycatchers bred every year and find their nest; where in the hedge the blackberries were most abundant; where the elders grew by the stream from which he could watch the moorhens and watervoles; that he knew every fence, gate, and outhouse, every room and passage in the old house.  Through all his busy years that picture never grew less beautiful, never ceased its call, and at last, possessed of sufficient capital to yield him a modest income for the rest of his life, he came home.  What he was going to do in England he did not consider.  He only knew that until he had satisfied the chief desire of his heart and had looked upon the original of the picture he had borne so long in his mind he could not rest nor make any plans for the future.

He came first to London and found, on examining the map of Hampshire, that the village of Thorpe (I will call it), where he was born, is three miles from the nearest station, in the southern part of the county.  Undoubtedly it was Thorpe; that was one of the few names of places his father had mentioned which remained in his memory always associated with that vivid image of the farm in his mind.  To Thorpe he accordingly went —­as pretty a rustic village as he had hoped to find it.  He took a room at the inn and went out for a long walk—­“just to see the place,” he said to the landlord.  He would make no inquiries; he would find his home for himself; how could he fail to recognize it?  But he walked for hours in a widening circle and saw no farm or other house, and no ground that corresponded to the picture in his brain.