I don’t know just what kind of a mental picture you have of my present life--to be accurate it would need to be rather kaleidoscopic, for my activities and the spheres of them vary frequently and greatly. But this afternoon you (or perhaps not you, but readers of Empey and Private Peat and the rest of that mob of war writers--thank God, let me Pharisaicly say, that I am not one of them--would do so) would have been amazed at the martial picture before you, had you seen me. Just outside the edge of the forest of firs and spruce in which we fourteen men live is a lovely meadow. There, among the knee-high buttercups, lay in the May sunshine all afternoon three warriors--myself being one. Whiles we smoked and gazed at the lovely valley miles below us--whiles we took turns in reading aloud from--what do you suppose? The Oxford Book of English Verse! We read Gray’s Elegy, the first chorus from Atalanta in Calydon, “They told me, Heraclitus,” that witch poem of William Bell Scott, “Love in the Valley,” “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “Keith of Ravelston,” and half a dozen other poems, all of which brought you most poignantly and beautifully before me. No, they didn’t bring you before me--you are always before me and with me and in my heart and brain--but it’s dangerous to write this--it draws so tight the cords that bind me to you that they cut painfully into my flesh. Well, we are to be together sometime, inevitably, and soon in terms of eternity. For we are absolutely one, incomplete apart, and in Heaven is completeness. How unhappy must lovers be who have not the gracious gift of faith! There is to be an Homeric banquet at our house one day--the day when I exhibit to my comrades the glory of my life--yourself. You will like them all--Watson (a gifted artist from Richmond, who is now at work on a fine drawing which must accompany Rouge Bouquet in _Scribner’s_), Bob Lee, Titterton (my especial friend), Beck, Mott, Kerrigan, Levinson--say a prayer for them all, they’re brave men and good, and splendid company. They are all men of education, and breeding, and humour, and we have fine times. Dangers shared together and hardships mutually borne develops in us a sort of friendship I never knew in civilian life, a friendship clean of jealousy and gossip and envy and suspicion--a fine hearty roaring mirthful sort of thing, like an open fire of whole pine-trees in a giant’s castle, or a truly timed bombardment with eight-inch guns. I don’t know that this last figure will strike you as being particularly happy, but it would if you’d had the delight of going to war.