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Show When the Professor returned from his leave; he had circumnavigated the globe; Seven years earlier, when he had arrived in San Francisco from the Midwest, he had looked across the Pacific and announced to friends that the next time he visited Europe he would do so by sadling across these waters.1 Now it had been accomplished; He and his wife had taken four months and seven ships to reach Venice; He had begun writing a book between Honolulu and Tokyo, and he had finished it and mailed it to his publishers from the Dolomites, nine months later? His return home had been to California by way of the Carribean and the Panama Canal, and he was returning Just a few weeks before his sixtieth birthday; Only a few moments before he had been standing at the rail with two Scottish ladies who were on their way to Australia, pointing across the bay to the Marin County hills, where his house was located; barely hidden behind the Jutting prominence of Mount Tamalpais? Now; on solid ground within the customs enclosure'? the Professor's body still rocked with the movement of the ship; and his head felt dull from the excessive drinking he had done the night before.' Behind the barrier separating customs from the remainder of the gloomy warehouse interiorV he caught sight of his sister-in-law; who had driven up the peninsula to meet them, Just as she had driven up twelve months earlier to see them |