So these fellows listened to my tale as raptly as if a trumpet were sounding in their ears. It was like a summons to them to come out of stupefaction. They asked questions not only as to my own experiences, but as to the causes and purposes of the war in general. I do not affirm that they were the most intelligent questions that could be asked; but for men in their condition they were astonishing. That they were not of necessity to be easy converts I could see when the old chap sitting apart asked again, in his bitter voice, “Did you ever kill a fellow-creetur that had the same right to live as yourself?” As we discussed that aspect of the subject, too, I found it difficult to restrain my audience from the free fight for which at the Down and Out there was always an inclination. I accomplished this, however, and as I rose to go the brawny Hercules sidled shyly up to me with the words: “Say! I’m a Canuck. Peterfield, Ontario, is where I hail from. Why ain’t I in this here war?” He was my first recruit. A few weeks later he was in uniform in Montreal. My object in telling you about him is to point out the fact that I made a beginning, and that from the beginning the sympathy of the City of Comrades upheld me. Little by little that movement by which the whole of America was being shaken out of its materialism, its provincialism, and its mental isolation reached us in Vandiver Street, and we began to see that there were subjects of conversation more commanding than that of drink. What I may call a war party rose among us, and the sentiment that we ought to be in it was expressed. “We shall be in it when the time comes,” Andrew Christian said to me when we were alone for a few minutes after I had been talking with the men one day. “One of the great mistakes human impatience makes is in trying to hurry the methods by which the divine mind counteracts human errors. We forget that it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that the Father hath put into His own power. Things that take place in their own way generally take place in His. And the overruling force of His way, when we let it alone, working simply, naturally, and as a matter of course, is one of the extraordinary features of history.” I was the more impressed by these quiet words for the reason that I saw that he, too, was one of the Americans chafing under the long holding back of his country. No one I had seen since my return was more changed in this respect than he. I had left a man who had but one object in his life, the salvation of other men from drink. I found a man marvelously broadened, heightened, illumined, almost transfigured by a larger set of purposes. But he spoke so calmly!