He turned his big quiet grey eyes on mine and said very simply, "These things don’t happen, Mummy." He was very young when he learned that lesson. It all came true, not in my sense, but in his. Before the next summer came, his dear beautiful body was laid on the cliff side at the Kingdom by the Sea and his soul had stolen "away" to his appointed place in his Father’s House. That was the most beautiful summer in our lives—not in his only, but in our whole family life, of a richness and nearness and dearness, to describe which, there are no words. Well, and this the last summer of our garden’s life, in so far as it concerned us, was the most beautiful we have ever known, in a circle of many summers, all beautiful. Never had there been such wealth of bloom. The roses! They simply flung themselves in regal magnificence at our feet. The more you cut and gave away the more persistently they insisted upon coming on; not in single spies, but in battalions. The old walled vegetable garden which you so loved, being invariably found, when missing, between its box hedges, surpassed itself. We could not use the stuff. Our Belgian household over the way, of whose doing and being I as chairman of the Belgian Guest committee have written you so much, had access to the garden to help themselves. It is a royal memory we have; but only a memory. Sometimes it seems as if soon, all life would be only a memory. Hope seems—for the moment—to have folded her tent like the Arabs, and silently stolen away. *II* On the 12th Effie came home from France in her first leave from active service. You can imagine the excitement in the household, the somewhat tremulous expectancy of Himself and myself. The one ewe lamb, as you know right well, is a kind of desperate possession. Once or twice I have recalled your warning counsel not to let her leave us; but, my dear, you would have to be here to understand the strange new blood that is firing the veins of both youth and maturity and age, the red blood of patriotism. She was very young to go out to that strange awful sublime place they call the war zone. But she came back to us radiant, quite unchanged; but yes, there is a change. She has the eyes of one who, born in a great time, is striving to live greatly. She was, before the war, one of the lotus flowers to whom the call came opportunely, and now she is blooming for others all unconscious of herself. You who have known and shared my anxieties about her future, will rejoice with me, I know. She is not a good letter writer, she has the very Scotch habit of leaving out all you want to know. A dear English friend of mine, whose name I must not tell you, speaking of her husband, one day in a moment of exasperation said, "You have to take too much for granted with a Scotch husband." I smiled comprehendingly, having lived so long with Himself.