When I had said my prayers, and the candle had burnt out, I lay there yielding to a sensation of profound gratitude and rest, nestling in the snow white sheets, and I prayed that I might never be houseless any more, and might never forget the houseless.

Why did I loathe my lowly cot Where late I caroll'd free, Nor felt, contrasted with my lot, The pomp of high degree? Lo! where to mock the houseless head Huge palaces arise, Whose board uncharitably spread The unbidden guest denies.

From the princely bastard who sued in agony and vain humiliation, to the clown of Devon forced into the rebel ranks,from the peer who plotted, to the venerable and Christian woman whose sole crime was sheltering the houseless and starving fugitive, there was given to the vanquished no mercy but the mercy of Jeffreys, no tenderness but the tenderness of Kirk.

Add to these, That having gain'd a virtuous maiden's love, One fairly priz'd at twenty times his worth, He let her wander houseless from his door To seek new friends and find elsewhere a home.

Although we as yet knew every foot of the ground we were treading, it already began to wear an unfamiliar houseless and homeless look, an air of foreign travel, and though the shack was but a few yards behind us, it seemed already miles away, wrapped in lonely distance, wistfully forsaken.