eary
monotony. Sweat and dust and grime, weariness, homesickness, humbled
pride, these were the tales of the first days of those men gathered from
all quarters who were pioneers in the first camps.

Corporal Cameron marched his awkward squad back and forth, through all
the various manoeuvres, again and again, giving his orders in short,
sharp tones, his face set, his heart tortured with the thought of the
long months and years of this that might be before him. The world seemed
most unfriendly to him these days. Not that it had ever been over kind,
yet always before his native wit and happy temperament had been able to
buoy him up and carry him through hopefully. Now, however, hope seemed
gone. This war might last till he was too old to carry out any of his
dreams and pull himself out of the place where fortune had dropped him.
Gradually one thought had been shaping itself clearly out of the days he
had spent in camp. This life on earth was not all of existence. There
must be something bigger beyond. It wasn't sane and sensible to think
that any God would allow such waste of humanity as to let some suffer all
the way through with nothing beyond to compensate. There was a meaning to
the suffering. There must be. It must be a preparation for something
beyond, infinitely better and more worth while. What was it and how
should he learn the meaning of his own particular bit?

John Cameron had never thought about religion before in his life. He had
believed in a general way in a God, or thought he believed, and that a
book called the Bible told about Him and was the authentic place to learn
how to be good. The doubts of the age had not touched him because he had
never had any interest in them. In the ordinary course of events he might
never have thought about them in relation to himself until he came to
die--perhaps not then. In college he had been too much engrossed with
other things to listen to the arguments, or to be influenced by the
general atmosphere of unbelief. He had been a boy whose inner thoughts
were kept under lock and key, and who had lived his heart life absolutely
alone, although his rich wit and bubbling merriment had made him a
general favorite where pure fun among the fellows was going. He loved to
"rough house" as he called it, and his boyish pranks had always been the
talk of the town, the envied of the little boys; but no one knew his
real, serious thoughts. Not even his mother, strong and self-repressed