pent years of planning and making ready for this war.
And it has not taken us so long, all things considered, to catch up
with them.

John's letters were cheery and they came regularly, too, for a time.
But I suppose it was because they left out so much, because there was
so great a part of my boy's life that was hidden from me, that I
found myself thinking more and more of John as a wee bairn and as a
lad growing up.

He was a real boy. He had the real boy's spirit of fun and mischief.
There was a story I had often told of him that came to my mind now.
We were living in Glasgow. One drizzly day, Mrs. Lauder kept John in
the house, and he spent the time standing at the parlor window
looking down on the street, apparently innocently interested in the
passing traffic.

In Glasgow it is the custom for the coal dealers to go along the
streets with their lorries, crying their wares, much after the manner
of a vegetable peddler in America. If a housewife wants any coal, she
goes to the window when she hears the hail of the coal man, and holds
up a finger, or two fingers, according to the number of sacks of coal
she wants.

To Mrs. Lauder's surprise, and finally to her great vexation, coal
men came tramping up our stairs every few minutes all afternoon, each
one staggering under the weight of a hundredweight sack of coal. She
had ordered no coal and she wanted no coal, but still the coal men
came--a veritable pest of them.

They kept coming, too, until she discovered that little John was the
author of their grimy pilgrimages to our door. He was signalling
every passing lorrie from the window in the Glasgow coal code!

I watched him from that window another day when he was quarreling
with a number of playmates in the street below. The quarrel finally
ended in a fight. John was giving one lad a pretty good pegging, when
the others decided that the battle was too much his way, and jumped
on him.

John promptly executed a strategic retreat. He retreated with
considerable speed, too. I saw him running; I heard the patter of his
feet on our stairs, and a banging at our door. I opened it and
admitted a flushed, disheveled little warrior, and I heard the other
boys shouting up the stairs what they would do to him.

By the time I got the door closed, and got back to our little parlor,
John was standing at the window, giving a marvelous pantomime for the
benefit of his enemies in the street. He was putting his small,
clenche