The adventurous boy who, even in times of peace, was scornful of formal education and ran away to enlist in the navy or otherwise sought to widen the cramped horizons of home--and every town has this boy--still reappears at intervals to report to his parents and submit to the admiration and envy of his old schoolmates in the Main Street bazaars. This type endures and will, very likely, persist while there are seas to cross and battles to be won. The trumpetings of war stir the blood of such youngsters, and since our entrance into the war it has been my fortune to know many of them, who were anxious to dare the skies or play with death in the waters under the earth. The West has no monopoly of courage or daring, but it was reassuring to find that the best blood of the Great Valley thrilled to the cry of the bugle. On a railway-train I fell into talk with a young officer of the national army. Finding that I knew the president of the Western college that he had attended, he sketched for me a career which, in view of his twenty-six years, was almost incredible. At eighteen he had enlisted in the navy in the hope of seeing the world, but had been assigned to duty as a hospital orderly. Newport had been one of his stations; there and at other places where he had served he spent his spare hours in study. When he was discharged he signed papers on a British merchant vessel. The ship was short-handed and he was enrolled as an able seaman, which, he said, was an unwarranted compliment, as he proved to the captain’s satisfaction when he was sent to the wheel and nearly (as he put it) bowled over a lighthouse. His voyages had carried him to the Orient and the austral seas. After these wanderings he was realizing an early ambition to go to college when the war-drum sounded. He had taken the training at an officer’s reserve camp and was on his way to his first assignment. The town he mentioned as his home is hardly more than a whistling-point for locomotives, and I wondered later, as I flashed through it, just what stirring of the spirit had made its peace intolerable and sent him roaming.[B] At a club dinner I met another man, born not far from the town that produced my sailor-soldier, who had fought with the Canadian troops from the beginning of the war until discharged because of wounds received on the French front. His pocketful of medals--he carried them boyishly, like so many marbles, in his trousers pocket!--included the _croix de guerre_, and he had been decorated at Buckingham Palace by King George. He had been a wanderer from boyhood, his father told me, visiting every part of the world that promised adventure and, incidentally, was twice wounded in the Boer War.