notes about our inner experiences, and we found that the image of our beloved son in our eyes was the same: Paul looking divinely happy, standing before us with that enchanting smile we knew so well, and cheerily enjoining us to "Carry on; carry on!" Our love involves the love before; Our love is vaster passion now; Tho' mix'd with God and Nature thou, We seem to love thee more and more. Far off thou art, but ever nigh; We have thee still and we rejoice; We prosper, circled with thy voice; We shall not lose thee tho' we die. A few weeks after Paul was killed I opened a volume of Froude's "Short Studies." Our son's early death lends significance and pathos to passages he has marked in this book. Froude, in the essay on "England's Forgotten Worthies," speaking of honoured old age--"beautiful as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer"--says: "It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful." Then comes the following sentence which Paul has heavily underscored: There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the Cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows this side of the grave; which the grave gapes to finish before the victory is won; and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of man. Our son has written on the margin, "The best kind of life that of constant struggle." Froude goes on to refer to the work in the sixteenth century of the servants of England, whose life was a long battle, either with the elements or with men, and who passed away content when God had nothing more to bid them do. The following passages are again underlined: They did not complain, and why should we complain for them?... An honourable death had no terrors for them. "Seeing," in Humphrey Gilbert's own brave words, "that death is inevitable and the fame of virtue is immortal, wherefore in this behalf _mutare vel timere sperno_." Paul's marginal note to this is, "Compare Browning's 'Prospice.'" I turn to "Prospice" and I read: For the journey is done and the summit attained, And the barriers fall, Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, The reward of it all. I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, The best and the last! I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, And bade me creep past. No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers The heroes of old, Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears Of pain, darkness and cold. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And with God be the rest! PART II WAR LETTERS [Illustration: Paul as a Subaltern in the A.S.C. (From a Photograph by his Brother)] AT A HOME PORT