In absolute contrast to this sophisticated, possibly oversophisticated, mother was a simple woman who piteously showed me a piece of shrapnel taken from her son’s body by his comrades, which they had brought home to her in a literal-minded attempt at comfort. They had told her that the shrapnel was made in America and she showed it to me, believing that I could at sight recognize the manufactured products of my fellow-countrymen. She apparently wished to have the statement either confirmed or denied, because she was utterly bewildered in her feeling about the United States and all her previous associations with it. In her fresh grief, stricken as she was, she was bewildered by a sudden reversal of her former ideals. Many of her relatives had long ago emigrated to America, including two brothers living in the Western states, whom she had hoped to visit in her old age. For many reasons, throughout her youth and early womanhood, she had thought of that far-away country as a kindly place where every man was given his chance and where the people were all friendly to each other irrespective of the land in which they had been born. To have these same American people send back the ammunition which had killed her son was apparently incomprehensible to her. She presented, it seemed to me, a clear case of that humble internationalism which is founded not upon theories, but upon the widespread immigration of the last fifty years, interlacing nation to nation with a thousand kindly deeds. Her older brother had a fruit ranch which bordered upon one of those co-operative Italian colonies so successful in California, and he had frequently sent home presents from his Italian neighbors with his own little cargoes. The whole had evidently been prized by his family as a symbol of American good-will and of unbounded opportunity. Her younger brother had attained some measure of success as a contractor in an inland town, and when he had written home of the polyglot composition of the gangs of men upon whose labors his little fortune had been founded, she had taken it as an example of all nationalities and religions working happily together. He had also served one term as mayor, obviously having been elected through his popularity with the same foreign colonies from which his employes had been drawn.