Oh, that Old Nurse! what would she say now if she were watching and waiting here with us for her Master Roland to come home on leave, instead of lying in her grave as she has been for eighteen months, where the alarms of war reach her not! CHAPTER III THE FIRST STEPS OF THE LITTLE FEET There is nothing like smells, or clothes, for bringing back the past. The scent of the American currant will always bring my childhood back to me when even music could not do it. The hardest-hearted criminal can be softened sometimes to yielding and to tears by some smell that brings back an old home life long since forgotten. In the same way the sight of clothes worn in other days sends the memory darting back across the years. So it was with me when I was rummaging among my Little Yeogh Wough's things and found a pink linen coat and knee breeches and a little white-frilled shirt that had been worn with them. That little pink linen suit lit up the past for me just as a lamp lights up a dark place into which it is suddenly carried. I had a vision of yellow curls under a sailor hat and sunning out over a white embroidery collar. I saw little brown hands always finding something to do and doing it masterfully, reckless of consequences. I saw happy Christmases and birthdays made stupendously joyous by the coming of luxurious toys, which may have been wastefully extravagant, but which helped, anyhow, to build a foundation of happiness for the child and his sister and brother to look back to in after years. I saw battles in the nursery in which the Old Nurse and the under nurse were sometimes worsted and even received personal injuries. But, above all, I saw two scenes which had a bearing on the future of my Yeogh Wough, who was one day to go to the trenches in France and Flanders and fight for his country. The first was the occasion of the christening of his newly arrived small brother. The scene was a London church, and after the christening ceremony the clergyman looked at Yeogh Wough and then spoke to me. "This elder boy was only baptised privately, at home, I believe?" "Yes." "Then he ought to be received properly into the Church. I will do it now." And he put out his hand and drew Yeogh Wough towards him. The boy went deathly white and we who watched him knew that one of his attacks of nerves was threatening. The big, brown, velvety eyes were for a moment shrinking and wavering. Then, as if something said within him that when one is a boy of just six years old one must go forward with things and play the game, he steadied and straightened himself suddenly, lifted his big head very high--it was like the head of a lion cub--and, though his cheeks were bloodless still, went through the ceremony without faltering. "He's got the stuff in him that heroes are made of," someone said to his father and to me. "He'd go to martyrdom just in the same way."