How that record of the silence succeeded by a smile grips the heart, for it was not the false courage that plays to the grandstand, but the deeper, truer courage that sinks self for the good of others, and does this not merely because it is a part of the game, but with the gladness that transfigures life. Such courage does not wait for some great occasion for exhibiting itself; it is revealed in the midst of the humdrum routine of daily life--a routine that is especially trying to those who have been looking forward to some great, perhaps dramatic service. A young man of seventeen entered the navy, with his parents' consent, as an apprentice. When he left home he had dreams of entering at once on a life of thrilling adventure where there would be numberless opportunities for the display of high courage. At the end of a month a friend asked him how he liked life at the navy yard. "Fine!" was the reply. "What are you doing?" was the next query. "They haven't given me anything but window washing to do yet," he replied, with a smile that was an index of character. A newspaper writer has told of a college student nineteen years old who enlisted in the navy. He was sent to one of our naval stations and told to guard a pile of coal. As the summer passed he still guarded that coal pile. He wrote home about it: "You know, dad, when we were little shavers, you always rubbed it into us that anything that was worth doing at all was worth doing as well as it could be done. I've been standing over that coal pile nearly three months now, and it looks just exactly as small as it did when I first landed on the job." "He was relieved from the coal pile at last and promoted," said the writer who told of him. "At the same time the government gave him a last chance to return to his college work. He thought it over carefully. He realized that America was going to need trained men as never before, but still, he decided, the best service that he individually could give was the one that he had chosen. He had a few days of leave before going on to his next assignment, and he hurried back to his home. He found that his summer task was a matter of town history, and he had to face a good deal of affectionate raillery about his coal pile. Of course he did not mind that. But his answer revealed his spirit: "'You may laugh, but that coal pile was all right. I'll admit it got on my nerves for a bit, but I figured it out that while I was taking care of that coal pile I was releasing some other fellow who knew things I didn't know, and who could do things I couldn't do. I'm ready to stand by a coal pile till the war ends, if that's where I can help the most.'"