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Show HOMESICKNESS. Men Surrounded by Pomp Yearn for Simple Life. (Philadelphia Ledger.) When the present Pope Pius X left Venice in order to attend the conclave ! of cardinals which met to elect the successor suc-cessor to Leo XIII, he fully expected to go back to Venice as soon as the conclave con-clave was over, and so he bought a return re-turn ticket, fit a recent interview with an American who describes the episode, the pope took from his pocket a little silver box containing the unused half of the ticket. God, he said, had changed his plans for him; he had never dreamed of being elected pope, and had expected, of course, to go back to his humble home with his sisters near St. Mark's cathedral in Venice, and take up again 'the life of a parish priest among the poor. If he could have his own way, he would much prefer to be there among his ill-fed, ill-clad parishioners, and not to have to occupy his lonely throne in the imposing spaciousness of ! the Vatican. But God's will was otherwise, other-wise, and In God's will he acquiesced, with devout resignation. It was a comfort to him, however, he said, to carry the railway ticket about with him and look at it once in a while. Many a potentate, hedged in by awesome awe-some ceremonial, has yearned for the simple life and frugal fare of his earlier, Irresponsible existence. One of the great characteristics of Lincoln was that he never forgot his father's home ! and his. boyhood days. The eompara- tive grandeur of the White House did not obliterate in his mind's eye the log cabin, with its rude furnishings, the loft in the garret, where, on his pallet of straw or leaves, he had felt the chilling Mind through the crevices or the sifting snow. He loved it, neveEtheless, because be-cause it was his home, and he was never nev-er ashamed of it because it was but a poor and dingy hovel. Men's memories revert to the places where as boys they used to play the apple orchard, the old garden, the swimming hole, every nook and cranny of the old farmhouse from attic to woodshed or mysterious cellar. From far countries thought wirelessly bridges the gap between a man and his home, j wherever it may be, and just so, ( though it may have been years ago, his memory reverts to his boyhood across the years, and he sees and feels again i what happened then, as though it were but yesterday. The man to whom one part of the world is like another is abnormal. ab-normal. It is usual and natural to feel ( a strong attachment for a particular locality. lo-cality. The feeling, of course, varies in , intensity with different individuals, but sometimes in the man who has always seemed most indifferent the sentiment , for "his own people," the yearning-to go back to his own home, is awakened by some trivial circumstance. The man whom nothing moves to want to go home is almost more to be commhjer-ated commhjer-ated than the man without a country. |