That which comes more often than my sense of loss is the sense of my part in letting you go, making you go! You remember that August afternoon when we drifted down the river, for you even forgot to row; the trailing willow branches ruffled our hair and gently took off my hat. It was a lazy, sunshiny, misty afternoon, such a happy afternoon, except for the war-cloud beyond the peace and the exquisite grey and green calm of Oxford. You were wondering, idly enough, about war; how was it to be justified? What right had England, with her love of peaceful enlightenment, to take this swift plunge into the awful horror? And you went, my Lord Hamlet, with that deepening look which showed a soul drawn far within, into a long philosophic discussion as to whether war is ever justifiable; no one could adjust philosophic niceties of thought better than you. Could a man of ethical conviction, without outrage to his better self, go into that barbaric hell? All the time that your intellect was balancing, weighing, and deciding "no!" old impulses were stirring, old heroic fingers were tugging from their graves, old simple-minded forebears were alive and awake, impelling you. The green, lovely banks grew dim; the shadows lengthened across the rippling water, and sunset flushed the western sky beyond the overhanging branches, while you fought it out. When you turned and asked me squarely, what could I say? It had seemed so piteously, cruelly simple to me from the first, so simple and so great! Of course, I come of the practical American race. Back of me lie generations of ancestors who have had to act and act quickly without exhausting the ultimate possibilities of thought on any subject. I do not mean that they have done unjustifiable things, but that they have had to take life at the quick. When the Indian brandished his tomahawk inside the door at the baby in the cradle, some one had to shoot and shoot instantly, without stopping to ask any authority whether shooting was wrong. That actually happened in my family; it was a little great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of mine. Her Pilgrim father was quite right. Even if his mind told him that it was wrong, which I judge was not the case, there was something in him deeper down and farther back than mere intellect; he did the right thing and did it instinctively, Lord Hamlet. Of course, in reality, his intellectual problem had been settled when he loaded his gun. All life is transition, and always has been. As I understand it, with one's ancestor one has to load one's gun with one hand, while reaching forward with the other to one's descendant for the pipe of peace. One has to keep collected, centered, ready to do one's utmost in any need; the luxury of the last shade of reasoning is denied us as yet: our task is not to fail at the crisis.