And there are thousands on whom the mere excitement of the new scenes, the new countries, cities, and men, has acted like flame on invisible ink, bringing out a hundred unexpected aptitudes, developing a mental energy that surprises themselves. "On my farm," says a farmer I know, "I have both men that have been at the front, and are allowed to come back for agricultural purposes, and others that have never left me. They were all much the same kind of men before the war; but now the men who have been to the front are worth twice the others. I don't think they _know_ that they are doing more work, and doing it better than they used to do. It is unconscious. Simply, they are twice the men they were." And in the towns, in London, where, through the Play Centers, I know something of the London boy, how the discipline, the food, the open air, the straining and stimulating of every power and sense that the war has brought about, seems to be transforming and hardening the race! In the noble and Pauline sense, I mean. These lanky, restless lads have indeed "endured hardness." Ah, let us take what comfort we can from these facts, for they are facts--in face of these crowded graveyards in the battle zone, and all the hideous wastage of war. They mean, surely, that a new heat of intelligence, a new passion of sympathy and justice, has been roused in our midst by this vast and terrible effort, which, when the war is over, will burn out of itself the rotten things in our social structure, and make reforms easy which, but for the war, might have rent us in sunder. Employers and employed, townsman and peasant, rich and poor--in the ears of all, the same still small voice, in the lulls of the war tempest, seems to have been urging the same message. More life--more opportunity--more leisure--more joy--more beauty!--for the masses of plain men and women, who have gone so bare in the past and are now putting forth their just and ardent claim on the future. Let me recall a few more personal landmarks in the eighteen years that have passed since _Eleanor_ appeared, before I close.