Last night we had a very beautiful experience. We were searching for a man on most important business, but as the wrong address had been given, that part of it ended in wild-goose chase. Nevertheless we were brought into contact with a real bit of wonder. It was an exquisite night. The moon, big, warm, and round as a harvest moon at home, hung low near the dreaming world. The trees stood still and ghost-like, and the river ran through a picture of breathless beauty. We had got away beyond houses, and were climbing up through a great far-stretching glade. The roar before us was a trellis of shadow and moonlight. Suddenly we had to stand and listen. It was the nightingale. How indescribably glorious! The note of inquiry, repeated and repeated, like a searching sadness; and then the liquid golden stream of other-world song. How wonderfully peaceful the night lay all around--the very moonlight seemed to soften in the listening. And yet again came the question with the sob in it; and then the cry of the heart running over. The valley lay lapped in luminous haze, a lake somewhere shining. But there was no other sound, no motion, no sign of life anywhere--only ourselves standing in that shadow glade, and that song of the beginnings of the world's sadness, yearning, and delight, somewhere in the thicket near. It was difficult to believe that we were in a land of war; that not far from us lay ruined towns of ancient story; that the same moonlight, so flooded with delight for us, was falling on the uninterred, the suffering, and the dying, and the graves where brave dust was buried. It was all very beautiful. And yet, somehow, it made me weary. For I could not help thinking of the boy we had laid down to rest, so far from home, and the piper playing "Lochaber No More" over his grave. And of the regiment we had seen that very day, marching in full equipment, with the pipers at the head of the column, so soon to be separated from the peat fires and the dear ones more widely than by sundering seas. And we hated the war. God recompenses the cruel ones who loosened that bloody curse from among the old-time sorrows which were sleeping, to afflict again the world! AN AVIATOR'S STORY OF BOMBARDING THE ENEMY _Told by a French Aviator_ This is a tale of the risks, the courage, the fears, the luck, the compulsion of duty and the haunting memory of destruction that mark the fighting service of the airmen. It is a French aviator's plain tale of experience from _Illustration_, Paris. I--"OUR FLIGHT AT DAY BREAK"