Saturday afternoons were the days of our reunions, and we came to the last in June. It was a fatal day, the 28th, marking the fifth anniversary of the tragedy through which the new world began to dissociate itself forever from the old. As contemporary history was a large part of our interest, with the development of man’s efforts stage by stage, the occasion naturally came in for comment. On that particular day we were in the great room, which, as far as I know, has no rival in any other museum in the world, where the whole history of ceramic art is visually unfolded in order from the crude, strong products of the Han, Tang, and Sung dynasties in China, up through the manifold efflorescence of European art to such American works as that of Bennington, Cincinnati, and Dedham, which may be the forerunner of a new departure. We had come to that section of the room where were displayed the first representative pieces brought back from the East by merchants and ambassadors, and so voyages of discovery were in order. Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama and the Dutch, English, and Portuguese explorers had been discussed, and I was in the act of giving to my boys the story of the origin of delftware as an attempt to reproduce in abundance what the Oriental traders brought over only in small quantities. The specimens of delft being on shelves but little above the floor, I was crouched in a half-sitting position, with the lads hanging over my shoulders. Not till I had finished this part of my exposition did I rise, to find on turning that a lady was looking on. Recognition on my part lagged behind amazement. Tall, slender, distinguished, dressed in black, and somewhat thickly veiled for a day in June, it was the sort of apparition to make a man doubt the accuracy of his senses. Before my lips could frame a word she held out something toward me, saying simply: "Billy, I came to bring you this." The boys fell back, knowing by instinct that the moment was one of dramatic significance to me and looking on overawed. What I had in my hand I saw at once to be nothing but a copy of one of the New York papers that appear in the afternoon. That it contained some announcement affecting me went without saying, and a half-dozen terrors crowded into my mind at once. Without my knowing it she might have got a divorce; she might have got a divorce and remarried; she might have lost her money; I might have lost mine; some one near to us might be dead. I held the paper stupidly, staring at her through the veil, and opening the journal without seeing it. When my eyes fell on the first page it was entirely a white blankness, except for a single word in enormous letters: *PEACE!* My eyes lifted themselves to hers; fell to that one word again; lifted themselves to hers once more. She stood impassive, motionless, waiting. "So—so they’ve signed it," was all I could find to stammer out.