The Next of Kin | Page 9

would only stay!
Before the turn in the road hid it from sight we stopped and looked
back at the "Kee-am Cottage"--my last recollection of it is of the
boarded windows, which gave it the blinded look of a dead thing, and
of the ferns which grandma had brought from the big woods beyond the
railway track and planted all round it, and which had grown so quickly
and so rank that they seemed to fill in all the space under the cottage,
and with their pale-green, feathery fringe, to be trying to lift it up into
the sunshine above the trees. Instinctively we felt that we had come to
the end of a very pleasant chapter in our life as a family; something had
disturbed the peaceful quiet of our lives; somewhere a drum was
beating and a fife was calling!
Not a word of this was spoken, but Jack suddenly put it all into words,
for he turned to me and asked quickly, "Mother, when will I be

eighteen?"
Gay, as the skater who blithely whirls To the place of the dangerous ice!
Content, as the lamb who nibbles the grass While the butcher sets the
price! So content and gay were the boys at play In the nations near and
far, When munition kings and diplomats Cried, "War! War!! War!!!"
CHAPTER II
WORKING IN!
The day after we went to the city I got my first real glimpse of war! It
was the white face of our French neighbor. His wife and two little girls
had gone to France a month before the war broke out, and were visiting
his family in a village on the Marne. Since the outbreak of war he had
had no word from them, and his face worked pitifully when he told me
this. "Not one word, though I cabled and got friends in London to wire
aussi," he said. "But I will go myself and see."
"What about your house and motor?" he was asked.
He raised his shoulders and flung out his hands. "What difference?" he
said; "I will not need them."
I saw him again the day he left. He came out of his house with a small
Airedale pup which had been the merry playmate of Alette and Yvonne.
He stood on the veranda holding the dog in his arms. Strangers were
moving into the house and their boxes stood on the floor. I went over to
say good-bye.
"I will not come back," he said simply; "it will be a long fight; we knew
it would come, but we did not know when. If I can but find wife and
children--but the Germans--they are devils--Boches--no one knows
them as we do!"
He stood irresolute a moment, then handed me the dog and went
quickly down the steps.

"It is for France!" he said.
I sat on the veranda railing and watched him go. The Airedale blinded
his eyes looking after him, then looked at me, plainly asking for an
explanation. But I had to tell him that I knew no more about it than he
did. Then I tried to comfort him by telling him that many little dogs
were much worse off than he, for they had lost their people and their
good homes as well, and he still had his comfortable home and his
good meals. But it was neither meals nor bed that his faithful little heart
craved, and for many weeks a lonely little Airedale on Chestnut Street
searched diligently for his merry little playmates and his kind master,
but he found them not.
There was still a certain unreality about it all. Sometimes it has been
said that the men who went first went for adventure. Perhaps they did,
but it does not matter--they have since proved of what sort of stuff they
were made.
When one of the first troop trains left Winnipeg, a handsome young
giant belonging to the Seventy-ninth Highlanders said, as he swung
himself up on the rear coach, "The only thing I am afraid of is that it
will all be over before we get there." He was needlessly alarmed, poor
lad! He was in time for everything; Festubert, Saint-Éloi, Ypres; for the
gas attacks before the days of gas-masks, for trench-fever, for the
D.C.M.; and now, with but one leg, and blind, he is one of the happy
warriors at St. Dunstan's whose cheerfulness puts to shame those of us
who are whole!
There were strange scenes at the station when those first trains went out.
The Canadians went out with a flourish, with cheers, with songs, with
rousing music from the bands. The serious men were the French and
Belgian reservists, who, silently, carrying their bundles, passed through
our city, with grim, determined faces. They knew, and