It was the great heart of our men, beating as the one heart of a great country--simple, vigorous, young, trying out its strength--on the background of old Europe, which appealed to me. It was the spontaneous incidents of emotion breaking out of routine which revealed character. One day on a path across the fields near headquarters town, I met a soldier with a wound stripe who had been invalided back from the front. He was thick-set, bow-legged, with a square, honest face, and eyes slightly walled, and he was leading a bow-legged sturdy child of four years, whose one visible eye showed a cast resembling the soldier's own. The other eye was hidden by a drooping wool Tam-o'-Shanter about four sizes too large for the child's head, while his wool sweater and wool leggings were not more than two sizes too large. It was evident that a man and not a woman had bought his wardrobe, having in mind that the child was to be kept warm at any cost. The pair aroused my interest. "I heard all about adopting French war orphans through the societies," the soldier said, "and I concluded, when they sent me here, to pick out my own orphan. So I adopted Jake. Yes, I calls him Jake. You see, his father was killed by the boche and his mother croaked. He hadn't anybody to look after him, so I took over the job. Didn't I, Jake?" Jacob looked up with an eye that seemed to consider this a wonderful world created by the soldier, and removed his finger from his mouth long enough to say "Yep," which he had learned in the place of "Oui." "I'm going to take Jake home with me, and make him an American, ain't I, Jake? You're learning English too, ain't you, Jake?"--with Jake taking up his cue to prove that he was by responding "Yep!" again. When they started on, I paused to look after them, with something catching in my throat, and as the soldier paused I overheard him saying: "I'm going to take you home. Don't you worry--I'm sticking to that, Jake. The French regulations will say that they ain't going to let you leave France when they're so short of kids over here, and the American regulations will say there ain't no room for kids on transports, and probably the censor will lip in too--but I'll bring you after the war if I can't now. You and me's fixed up a life pardnership, ain't we? You'll make a hit with my mother, all right. All you've got to do is look up at her just the way you're looking up at me and say 'Yep.' Oh, it'll be all right over there--no more of this war and regulation stuff!"