He, the Outborn, had come home; the landless had found his settlement.

He loved every acre of this strange England--its changing skies, the soft pastures in the valleys, the copses that clung like moss to the hills, the wide moorland that lay quiet as a grave from mountain to mountain.

But this day something new had been joined to his affection.

The air that met him from the east had that in it which stirred some antique memory.

There was brine in it from the unruly eastern sea, and the sourness of marsh water, and the sweetness of marsh herbage.