ABSTRACT
Home's arrival in England in 1869 was not unlike his Mexico homecoming; his life, it seemed, was forever a making of adjustments, and at sixty-seven he was too old to adjust easily. The voyage itself was a welcome interlude of emotional security, with at the end the prospect of a triumphant homecoming. To the captive shipboard audience he spent much of his time playing the guitar or lecturing on the Causes of Success in Life; he gave a champagne dinner on rounding his 'rocky namesake', Cape Horn, and with a former editor of the Ceylon Observer he entertained the passengers with a weekly journal called Lady Jocelyn's Weekly Mail. Altogether it was a satisfactory trip. And when on September 25, in sunshine worthy of Australia, they sighted England, his joy was uncontainable. He was returning, he had come to believe, with that 'fortune' for which he had set out; he had deluded himself into thinking that his savings were sufficient to support him without anxiety for the rest of his days. The sojourn in Australia had not been, after all, a waste of time.
