Your gay bravery, your simple tenderness, and your fine humour make an epic, Thomas Atkins, and it is you yourself who write it, all unknowingly. “Tell mother I’m all Sir Garnet, Al.” “How is little Dick? Give him a kiss. He must be a great man in this long while. Love to the old lady and write soon”; and then, “I am wading in blood!” “Irene’s prayer-book is always with me, although it upsets me to think of her saying her little prayers for me. I have got some French slippers for the children, which I hope to be able to bring to England. They are very quaint--_Bon jour!_” “I parted with my badge to a little Belgian girl who, with her mother, was giving our boys milk to drink. She was just like Dora, and was wildly delighted to get such a souvenir.” “If you have not sold Nigger I should like to have a photo of him and the two boys, or Jack and the dog, to show some of my chums.” Thinking tenderly of home! With tenderness, Private Atkins, you have chivalry; or, as you would put it yourself, you “know how to behave towards a woman.” “The Red Cross girleens, with their purty faces and their sweet ways, are as good men as most of us, and better than some of us. They are not supposed to venture into the firing line, but they get there all the same, and devil the one of us durst turn them away.” Of course not, my Irish soldier, and maybe it was you who plucked the grapes that a French maiden couldn’t reach, and had the surprise and confusion of your life when, in thanks, she kissed you on both cheeks. She knew, with the woman’s instinct, that she could fire your chivalry and still trust it. “_Très correct_” is the universal tribute you get in France, and it is a tribute to wear under your medals, next to your heart--a Legion of Honour for the gentleman you are. You have given your French friends another true taste of yourself in your high spirits, your jollity, your manifestation that the merry heart goes all the day. You have the gift of wonder, which means imagination, and occasions for exercising it, as when the concussion of a shell flung you up into a tree, and your sergeant, missing you and looking around, asked in military language where you had gone! You came down to tell him and couldn’t, and thereupon the wonder of the thing seized him also. That incident was of the drawbridge order which links tragedy and humour, for they march together even in the battlefield with you. Serious, nay, grave things may be framing you about, but your eye never misses the rift of humour, and that is good.