Anna Forge stalked homeward. The two women did not speak for a month. But Nat’s mother had done a malicious thing that day. She had only turned the barb of my friend’s curiosity inward and prodded that worst enemy of the human race to attack her small son viciously: _Repression_. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III MORE PARENTS I Over the meadows and far away in the dreamy hush of summer days; lying amid scented haycocks and watching the castling clouds drift away like floating fairy isles in a sea of turquoise; listening to the church bells of a quiet Sunday morning; hearing the clear, distant note of a trombone across the valley from some farmhouse in the afterglow; watching the log sleds toil up the hill past our homes into the cold, carmine glory of winter sunsets. Boyhood’s Memory Book is an anthology of little things—sweet, sad, haunting, all vital, ever poignant with heart-hunger—calling us back to live in their atmosphere again, if only for a single blessed day. Somehow Nat and I fail to remember the ending of the Spanish war as we recall the beginning. Occasionally we would be loitering about the station when trains pulled in and sun-bronzed men in rumpled blue would swing off in pairs, with blanket rolls around their bodies, thump their rifles down in the corner of the nearest lunchroom and appear too ravenously hungry even to flirt with the girl who presided behind the sandwiches and wedges of leathery pie beneath glass globes. The war did not stop. It petered out. I will not say I did not cry many times in the night when my mother cried, because both of us missed father. But the war was not for Nathan and me,—not for our generation to bear. _Our_ war was coming later. We found food of some kind available when we hungered and boys are not epicures. So long as that food was forthcoming, and we had a place to sleep at night, wars or endings of wars affected us not We were too occupied with things that were close to us and close to the soil. One afternoon in the spring of 1917, before we went to war, Nathan and I were walking together when we came upon a crowd of deadly serious youngsters playing in a vacant lot. One boy, tied securely, was arousing the neighborhood with his shrieking. “We’re playin’ he’s a German interned for perdition,” one of the lads explained. “_Per_dition?” exclaimed Nathan. “Yeah! Oratin’ against the government and tryin’ to stop the war fer them that wanner fight. Intern fer perdition, doncher understand? Interned for perdition!” “Kids don’t change much, Bill,” commented Nat, with a sad smile, as we resumed our way. “Remember the day we played ‘Hang the Spy’ and almost succeeded?”