It is good to look about the world; but always there comes a time when the restless creature, man, having yielded to the call of the seas and the stars and the sky, and gone a-journeying, begins to think of home again. Even were home a less satisfactory, a less happy place than it is, he would be bound to think of it after so long a journey as that upon which my companion and I had spent so many months. For, just as it is necessary for a locomotive to go every so often for an overhauling, so it is necessary for the traveler to return to headquarters. The fastenings of his wardrobe trunk are getting loose, and the side of it has been stove in; his heels are running down in back, his watch needs regulating, his umbrella-handle is coming loose, he is running out of notebooks and pencils and has broken a blade of his knife in trying to open a bottle with it (because he left his corkscrew in a hotel somewhere along the way). His fountain pen has sprung a leak and spoiled a waistcoat, his razors are dull, his strop is nicked, and he has run out of the kind of cigarettes and cigars he likes. One lens of his spectacles has gotten scratched, his mail has ceased to reach him, his light suits are spotted, baggy and worn, and his winter suits are becoming too heavy for comfort as the spring advances. His neckties are getting stringy, he has hangnails and a cough; he never could fix his own hangnails, and he cannot cure his cough because the bottle of glycerine and wild cherry provided for just such an emergency by the loved ones at home, got broken on the trip from Jacksonville to Montgomery, and went dribbling down through the trunk, ruining his reference books, three of his best shirts, and the only decent pair of russet shoes he had left. The other shoes have been ruined in various ways; one pair was spoiled in a possum hunt at Clinton, North Carolina—and it was worth it, and worth the overcoat that was ruined at the same time; two pairs of black shoes have been caked up with layers and layers of sticky blacking, and one pair of russets was ruined by a well intentioned negro lad in Memphis, who thought they would look better painted red. His traveler's checks are running low and he is continually afraid that, amid his constantly increasing piles of notes and papers, he will lose the three books in each of which remains a few feet of "yellow scrip"—the mileage of the South—which will take him on his return journey as far as Washington.

Nor is that all. The determining factor in his decision to go home lies in the havoc wrought by a long succession of hotel laundries—laundries which starch the bosoms of soft silk shirts, which mark the owner's name in ink upon the hems of sheer linen handkerchiefs which already have embroidered monograms, which rip holes in those handkerchiefs and then fold them so that the holes are concealed until, some night, he whips one confidently from the pocket of his dress suit, and reveals it looking like a tattered battle-flag; laundries which leave long trails of iron rust on shirt-bosoms, which rip out seams, tear off buttons, squeeze out new standing collars to a saw-tooth edge, iron little pieces of red and brown string into collars, cuffs, and especially into the bosoms of dress shirts, and "finish" dress shirts and collars, not only in the sense of ending their days of usefulness as fast as possible, but also by making them shine like the interiors of glazed porcelain bathtubs. But the greatest cruelty of the hotel laundry is to socks. It is not that they do more damage to socks, than to other garments, but that the laundry devil has been able to think of a greater variety of means for the destruction of socks than for the destruction of any other kind of garment. He begins by fastening to each sock a cloth-covered tin tag, attached by means of prongs. On this tag he puts certain marks which will mean nothing to the next laundry. The next laundry therefore attaches other tin tags, either ripping off the old ones (leaving holes where the prongs went through) or else letting them remain in place, so that, after a while, the whole top of the sock is covered with tin, making it an extraordinarily uncomfortable thing to wear, and a strange thing to look at. There is still another way in which the laundry devil tortures the sock-owner. He can find ways to shrink any sock that is not made of solid heavy silk; and of course he can rip silk socks all to pieces. He will take silk-and-wool socks of normal length, and in one washing will so reduce them that you can hardly get your foot into them, and that the upper margins of them come only about an inch above your shoe-tops. People who have no business to do so, are thus enabled, when you are seated, to see the tops of your socks and to amuse themselves by counting the tin tags with which they are adorned. Also, the socks, being so short, become better pullers than the garters, so that instead of the garters holding the socks up, the socks pull the garters down. This usually occurs as you are walking up the aisle in church, or in the middle of a dance, and of course your garter manages to come unclasped, into the bargain, and goes trailing after you, like a convict's ball and chain.

For a time you can stand this sort of thing, but presently you begin to pine for the delicate washtub artistry of Amanda, at home; for vestments which, when sent to the wash, do not come back riddled with holes, or smelling as though they had been washed in carbolic acid, or in the tub with a large fish.

So, presently, you fold up your rags like the Arabs, fasten your battered baggage shut as best you can, put it on a taxi, and head for the railway station. No train ever looks so handsome as the home-bound train you find there. No engineer ever looks so sturdy and capable, leaning from the window of his cab, as the one who is to take you home.

Up through the South you fly, past many places you have seen before, past towns where you have friends whom you would like to see again—only not now! Now nothing will do but home! Out of the region of magnolias, palmettoes and live-oaks you pass into the region of pines, and out of the region of pines into that of maples and elms. At last you come to Washington.... Only a few hours longer! How satisfyingly the train slips along! You are not conscious of curves, or even of turning wheels beneath you. Your progress is like the swift glide of a flying sled. Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton. Nothing to do but look from the car windows and rejoice. Not that you love the South less, but that you love home more.

"I wonder if we will ever go on such a trip as this again?" you say to your companion.

"I don't believe so," he replies.

"It doesn't seem now as though we should," you return. "But do you remember?—we talked the same way when we were coming home before. What will it be two years hence?"

"True," he says. "And of course there's Conan Doyle. He always thinks he's never going to do it any more. But in a year or so Sherlock Holmes pops out again, drawn by Freddy Steele, all over the cover of 'Collier's.' Not that your stuff is as good as Doyle's, but that the general case is somewhat parallel."

"Doyle has killed Holmes," you put in.

"Yes," he agrees, "and several times you've almost killed me."

Then as the train speeds scornfully through Newark, without stopping, he catches sight of a vast concrete building—a warehouse of some kind, apparently.

"Look!" he cries. "Isn't it wonderful?"

"That building?"

"Not the building itself. The thought that we don't have to get off here and go through it. Think what it would be like if we were on our travels! There would be a lot of citizens in frock coats. Probably the mayor would be there, too. They would drive us to that building, and take us in, and then they would cry if we refused to go to the fourteenth floor, where they keep the dried prunes."

The train slips across the Jersey meadows and darts into the tunnel.

"Now," he remarks hopefully, "we are really going to get home—if this tunnel doesn't drop in on us."

And when the train has emerged from the tunnel, and you have emerged from the train, he says: "Now there's no doubt that we are going to get home—unless we are smashed up in a taxi, on the way."

And when the taxi stops at your front door, and you bid him farewell before he continues on his way to his own front door, he says: "Now you're going to get home for sure—unless the elevator drops."

And when the elevator has not dropped, but has transported you in safety to the door of your apartment, and you have searched out the old key, and have unlocked the door, and entered, and found happiness within, then you wonder to yourself as I once heard a little boy wonder, when he had gone out of his own yard, and had found a number of large cans of paint, and had upset them on himself:

"I have a very happy home," he said, reflectively. "I wonder why I don't seem to stay around it more?"