We wuz to git back to London at the rapidest rate possible, and from thence embark for home.
Home! sweet sound! No word ever did, or ever can, sound so sweet as that word “home” duz hearn on a foreign shore. And though the journey seemed long and perilous and full of fatigue and danger, yet Josiah and I hearn it with joy.
So after a journey that seems, to look back on’t, like a confused dream of wonderful sights, and strange ones, rumatiz, car whistles, big hotels, cold beds, dyspeptic food, groans, sithes, beautiful views seen from flyin’ trains, talk in a strange language goin’ on round me, murmured words from a pardner, better left onsaid, dreams of home sot in a frame of foreign seenery, tired eyes and lims, dizzy flyin’ through space, headache, etc., etc., etc., after this dream we found ourselves in London.
We parted with Al Faizi in London. It wuz on the eve of our departure. Our tickets reposed in Martin’s vest-pocket, so I spoze, and our ship wuz to sail on the morrer.
The lamps wuz lit in our room, and their meller glow lit up the form of my companion, clad in his dressin’-gown and layin’ outstretched on the couch.
I myself wuz a-rubbin’ my spectacles with shammy-skin.
I see the minute that Al Faizi come in that he looked sort o’ agitated and riz up like. And anon I understood the reason—he had come to bid us good-bye.
I felt mean—mean as a dog. I hated to have him go, though Common Sense told me, and, of course, I didn’t spoze that I could in the common nater of things lug round a heathen with me everywhere I went all my life; but still I felt bad.
After the first compliments wuz spoke, and he told us that he wuz a-goin’, and we told him that we hated to have him go, and, etc., he sez:
“I have sought for the ways of love and truth all through these Western lands—and now—”