The corporal did not say that he was pressed for funds, but he offered to dispose of his treasured red pencil for a consideration. Peter bought it for a ruble, and presented it again. Then the Colonel bought it for a ruble, and he too followed the rest of Peter’s example. “But,” added the Colonel, “if I ever hear of you selling it again, I will not only take it away, but I will have you dismissed from the army in disgrace.” I wanted to see more of this astounding child; but when we changed trains at the next station, he too dropped into the stream of the procession and disappeared. The next part of the journey we made sitting upon a wooden bench in a fourth-class carriage. That night we picked up a sleeper again, and the Colonel insisted on stowing me away in the upper berth, with a tiny pillow that his daughter had made for him tucked under my head. He confided to Peter that I was the first American woman he had ever met. “My father was in the army before me, and my grandfather before him,” he said, with a sigh; “but I am going to send my boy to America to be educated for some other profession.” He understood the revolutionary soldier no more than young Brusiloff did. This lusty new thing that had come crashing into the ordered ways of his military life, and snapped its fingers in the face of all the traditions upon which his world was founded, left him hurt and helpless and bewildered. I fell asleep still listening to his voice. The next thing I knew, it was daylight, and he and Peter were hurrying me off the train. Not a note of war jarred the quiet of this landscape. Nothing in the wooded slopes or in the deep meadows remotely suggested war. The Colonel sniffed the morning air. “It smells like the front,” he said, with a sense of real satisfaction. We parted. He was to continue on the main line for another station, while we shot off in a different direction. The rest of the journey we made squatting on the floor of a box-car. The only other passengers were two soldiers and a tiny pansy-faced girl of six with great gray eyes, shy and wistful. She sat upon the edge of my skirt, spread out for that purpose, and seriously crunched sunflower seeds. Our way led through fields of rye, yellowing in the sunshine, and potato patches, green and promising. On the edge of the distant clearing a herd of cattle grazed, and along the road-bed women, barefooted and in calico dresses, worked with picks and wooden shovels. An army motor-truck, driven by a woman, chugged across our path.