"I wish you'd get a history of the United States--the best one there is. I'd like you to read that." So his mother sat by his bedside and read to him the history of his country, and when she laid down the book he considered what she had read, and pondered over the significance of it. He had been vaguely familiar with the history of the nation, but only vaguely. Now he was meeting his country for the first time, and groping for an understanding of it. Major Craig had asked him if he loved his country.... He fancied he had answered that question when he imagined it invaded as Belgium had been invaded. Now, day by day, he was learning why he should love his country; what his country meant, why it existed, why it had prospered, what his country was giving to him as one of its citizens. The United States was emerging from chaos in his mind, assuming a distinct entity, a _character_.... It was a lovable character. As he lay there, listening to the story of its life, Potter Waite was falling in love--he was falling in love with his country and his country's flag. His mother understood something of what was passing in his mind. It made her glad, for there was promise in it.... One day, following the completion of the history, she brought a thin little book. "I'd like to read this to you, son," she said, and he, not even asking for its name, because he thought to please her, nodded assent. It was a story with a peculiar title. "_The Man Without a Country_," his mother said. She commenced to read, and he lay with eyes closed, his attention not fixed. Presently he opened his eyes, and before half a dozen pages were read he was giving to the reading such attention as he had never given to any narrative before. His eyes did not leave his mother's face, and there came into them a hungry, troubled look.... His mother's face became dim, and he realized that he was seeing through a mist. Every word of that wonderful lesson, that text-book of patriotism, was reaching his mind as with rays of white light. At last she finished and looked down at him, and his cheeks were wet. She did not speak. It was he who spoke after a long silence. "That's the answer," he said, and his mother, possessing that marvelous quality, intuition, went quietly out of the room. It was not long before he was able to sit up. Two weeks past the second month of his confinement, he was well enough to be taken to his home, and there, in his own rooms, he demanded books. Not the books one might suppose, not books to pass the long hours of convalescence lightly, but treatises on the gas-engine, on carburetion, on ignition; highly specialized books on the aeroplane. "I should think you'd had aeroplane enough," his father said--a father who was now nearer to him by much than he had been before. "You're not going to meddle with those things again, I hope."