gangplank said was this:

"Of course you are going to be homesick. But it's worth it."

And I laughed.

But before that long stretch of gray-green ocean was plowed under I
knew--oh, I knew--that I was going to be most woefully homesick for the
U. S. A.

A certain tall Swede from New Jersey and I discovered that fact about
the same minute Fourth of July morning. We were standing on the deck,
staring miserably back over the awful miles to where somewhere in that
lost north our town lay with flags fluttering, picnic baskets getting
into trains and everybody out on their lawns and porches.

We didn't look at each other after that first glance--that Swede and I.
And we said the sunlight hurt our eyes.

Three months later I was sitting under the velvet-soft, star-sown night
sky of the Argentine cattle country. I had seen volcano-scarred
Martinique and had watched the beautiful island of Barbados rising like
a fairy dream out of a foamy sea.

I had marveled at the endless beauties of Rio lying so picturesquely in
its immense harbor and at the foot of its great, shaggy, sun-splashed,
smoke-wreathed mountains. I had tramped through unsanitary Santos and
loved it because it looked like Chicago in spite of its mountains and
banana trees. I had witnessed a wonderful fiesta in Buenos Aires and
had churned two hundred miles up the La Plata when it was bubbling with