“That ain’t gas the Germans used to start off with—that was just a little parlour scent squirted out so as to surprise the troops that weren’t looking for perfumes at the moment, but it looked bad. I admit it looked real bad. Those Canadians and all were splendid chaps, and it riles me to think they stood and died of it; they needn’t have died of it, if they hadn’t drunk it in wrong, and breathed too quick. Why, when I practised at it myself (after we got some over to experiment with) I sat kind of near the cylinder, and smoked a cigar right into it. I wasted that cigar, but I got no more harm than a turtle dove swallowing a gnat. _My_ gas—well—it’s a real gas! Thinking don’t matter to it, any more than Christian Science matters to a jug of prussic acid half way down your throat. “But gee! How long it took these English to see it! They just kinder felt they ought to be good about war. “I guess they don’t feel that way now; it’s been submarined out of them. “If we could have morally won this war—we wouldn’t have needed to have started it. We had all the morals in a row on our side sitting on the Belgian fence; but a good knock down blow at the fence kinder dispersed the morals. “That’s the way war acts. You can have morals before, and you can have morals after; in between you want to study the swiftest kicks.” Mr. Brett leaned back still further in his steamer chair, and drew his hat almost over his keen half shut eyes. “I guess,” he continued to himself dreamily, “that I shall just sit here and watch the English till I pan out. America’s my home, but I don’t want to die in it. I should feel too lively. You can live just as dead here as you like. No newspaper men, no prominent citizens, no delegates, nothing to keep up, and no one thinking how many million dollars you own and trying to creep inside them. “I’ve had my fight and Theodora’s dead; and I guess I feel played out. If there was a harp here I’d think I was in Heaven, but so long as Theodora’s in the next world I’m a good deal better off in this.” Oliver P. Brett sighed retrospectively at a passing butterfly. There was something in the tilt of its white and flashing wings that reminded him of Theodora. “It wiggle woggles to put you off,” said Mr. Brett thoughtfully, watching the insect’s tortuous approach to the fuchsias, which was causing much confusion to a more direct and simple minded bee, “but it knows what it’s about. That’s like Theodora too. “She wanted to die, and she always had to do what she wanted, and on that occasion she hadn’t time to change her mind before she really _was_ dead. The Almighty acted spry and took her at her word, which was more than I ever succeeded in doing.” Mr. Brett’s thoughts at this point did not stop, but they ceased to take the form of words; they crystallized into pictures. For the first time for forty years he was resting. In the quiet, old, creeper-covered, brick house behind him there was no one to thwart or work against him.