“And there’s the copse where the Lilies of the Valley powdered the ground in spring; and, I swear,”⁠—he put his head out with a sudden impulse⁠—“if that’s not the very clearing where Calame, the French boy, chased the swallowtail with me, and Bruder Pagel gave us half-rations for leaving the road without permission, and for shouting in our mother tongues!” And he laughed again as the memories came back with a rush, flooding his mind with vivid detail.

The train stopped, and he stood on the grey gravel platform like a man in a dream. It seemed half a century since he last waited there with corded wooden boxes, and got into the train for Strasbourg and home after the two years’ exile. Time dropped from him like an old garment and he felt a boy again. Only, things looked so much smaller than his memory of them; shrunk and dwindled they looked, and the distances seemed on a curiously smaller scale.