THE HOME

    I PACED alone on the road across the field while the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser¹.

    The daylight sank deeper and deeper into the darkness, and the widowed land, whose harvest had been reaped, lay silent.

    Suddenly a boy's shrill² voice rose into the sky. He traversed the dark unseen, leaving the track of his song across the hush³ of the evening.

    His village home lay there at the end of the waste land, beyond the sugar-cane field, hidden among the shadows of the banana and the slender areca palm, the cocoa-nut and the dark green jack-fruit trees.

    I stopped for a moment in my lonely way under the starlight, and saw spread before me the darkened earth surrounding with her arms countless⁴ homes furnished with cradles and beds, mothers' hearts and evening lamps, and young lives glad with a gladness that knows nothing of its value for the world.