We closed our cottage on August 24. That day all nature conspired to make us feel sorry that we were leaving. A gentle breeze blew over the lake and rasped its surface into dancing ripples that glittered in the sun. Blueberry Island seemed to stand out clear and bold and beckoning. White-winged boats lay over against the horizon and the _chug-chug_ of a motor-boat came at intervals in a lull of the breeze. The more tender varieties of the trees had begun to show a trace of autumn coloring, just a hint and a promise of the ripened beauty of the fall--if we would only stay! Before the turn in the road hid it from sight we stopped and looked back at the "Kee-am Cottage"--my last recollection of it is of the boarded windows, which gave it the blinded look of a dead thing, and of the ferns which grandma had brought from the big woods beyond the railway track and planted all round it, and which had grown so quickly and so rank that they seemed to fill in all the space under the cottage, and with their pale-green, feathery fringe, to be trying to lift it up into the sunshine above the trees. Instinctively we felt that we had come to the end of a very pleasant chapter in our life as a family; something had disturbed the peaceful quiet of our lives; somewhere a drum was beating and a fife was calling! Not a word of this was spoken, but Jack suddenly put it all into words, for he turned to me and asked quickly, "Mother, when will I be eighteen?" Gay, as the skater who blithely whirls To the place of the dangerous ice! Content, as the lamb who nibbles the grass While the butcher sets the price! So content and gay were the boys at play In the nations near and far, When munition kings and diplomats Cried, "War! War!! War!!!" CHAPTER II WORKING IN! The day after we went to the city I got my first real glimpse of war! It was the white face of our French neighbor. His wife and two little girls had gone to France a month before the war broke out, and were visiting his family in a village on the Marne. Since the outbreak of war he had had no word from them, and his face worked pitifully when he told me this. "Not one word, though I cabled and got friends in London to wire _aussi_," he said. "But I will go myself and see." "What about your house and motor?" he was asked. He raised his shoulders and flung out his hands. "What difference?" he said; "I will not need them." I saw him again the day he left. He came out of his house with a small Airedale pup which had been the merry playmate of Alette and Yvonne. He stood on the veranda holding the dog in his arms. Strangers were moving into the house and their boxes stood on the floor. I went over to say good-bye. "I will not come back," he said simply; "it will be a long fight; we knew it would come, but we did not know when. If I can but find wife and children--but the Germans--they are devils--Boches--no one knows them as we do!"