If the tent was lonely by day, it was infinitely more so by night. His small oil lamp flickered in the breeze; the moths came whirling round it and committed suicide down the narrow chimney; the dim light tried his eyes, and after a time he closed the book he was reading. As he did so, two lines of a hymn which his mother had taught him when he was a boy, flashed into his mind. As clearly as if her voice had repeated them to him he seemed to hear her saying:
"While place we seek or place we shun,
The soul finds happiness in none."
What was the end of the verse? He could not remember. He would think of something else; he would get his supper and go to bed.
But as he lay on his narrow camp bed, and listened to the flapping of the tent walls, to the cries of the owls, and to the croaking of the frogs in the pond on the headland, still over and over the words kept repeating:
"While place we seek or place we shun,
The soul finds happiness in none."
And still he puzzled himself as to the ending of the verse. But at last the sleep for which he had been longing blotted out even this remembrance.