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When I grow rich,

Say the bells of Shoreditch!

and again he is one of the group of children holding each others' hands to play at "oranges and lemons" in a Colonial garden. "So that Shoreditch we sang of under the fig-trees was a real place! No doubt the great bells hang up there!"—and for a moment the prosaic back-slum is an inverted childhood's fairy-land.

And there are perhaps few among us who, on our first visit, do not at some time creep away to find ourselves in some spot to which we do not wish our acquaintance to accompany us. It may be a street in a great city, or a village in a German forest, or an English parsonage; but we feel we are bound to it with a tie others may not touch. Perhaps it is only a shop-window at the corner of Finsbury Pavement at which we stand gazing in, because we know that sixty years before a little child with bright eyes and rosy cheeks came here, wrapped up in her furs, and holding her mother's hand, to buy her Christmas doll! And we stand gazing into it till we turn away sharply, fancying the people see what we feel. Or we go to a little country village; no one tells us the way from the station; but we see a church tower and an old elm-tree we have heard of; and as we walk towards them down the village street, we would like to run up to every one we meet, and say, "Oh! don't you see, we are come home again!" We stand at the parsonage gate and look over at the trim lawn, and the ivy on the bow-windows; and we go away. There is a stile where we know a man and a woman once talked on summer evenings, when they did not yet dream that the life they promised to spend together was to be lived out far over the seas, in the strange land which their children's children were to inherit. We wander into the churchyard, and brush the ivy from the gravestones; we stand at last before what we seek—years of European frost and rain have half obliterated the writing on the stones; we trace the letters with our fingers; the names are names we know, and which our kindred in the land across the seas will bear for generations. And so it comes to pass that we still call Europe "home"; though when we go there we may find nothing to bear witness to the fact, but a few broken headstones in a country churchyard—yet the land is ours![12]