ned there at
Dunoon. I cannot tell you what I said or what I did, or what words
and what thoughts passed between John's mother and myself. But there
are some things that I do know and that I will tell you.

Almighty God, to whom we prayed, was kind, and He was pitiful and
merciful. For presently He brought us both a sort of sad composure.
Presently He assuaged our grief a little, and gave us the strength
that we must have to meet the needs of life and the thought of going
on in a world that was darkened by the loss of the boy in whom all
our thoughts and all our hopes had been centred. I thanked God then,
and I thank God now, that I have never denied Him nor taken His name
in vain.

For God gave me great thoughts about my boy and about his death.
Slowly, gradually, He made me to see things in their true light, and
He took away the sharp agony of my first grief and sorrow, and gave
me a sort of peace.

John died in the most glorious cause, and he died the most glorious
death, it may be given to a man to die. He died for humanity. He died
for liberty, and that this world in which life must go on, no matter
how many die, may be a better world to live in. He died in a struggle
against the blackest force and the direst threat that has appeared
against liberty and humanity within the memory of man. And were he
alive now, and were he called again to-day to go out for the same
cause, knowing that he must meet death--as he did meet it--he would
go as smilingly and as willingly as he went then. He would go as a
British soldier and a British gentleman, to fight and die for his
King and his country. And I would bid him go.

I have lived through much since his death. They have not let me take
a rifle or a sword and go into the trenches to avenge him. . . . But
of that I shall tell you later.

Ah, it was not at once that I felt so! In my heart, in those early
days of grief and sorrow, there was rebellion, often and often. There
were moments when in my anguish I cried out, aloud: "Why? Why? Why
did they have to take John, my boy--my only child?"

But God came to me, and slowly His peace entered my soul. And He made
me see, as in a vision, that some things that I had said and that I
had believed, were not so. He made me know, and I learned, straight
from Him, that our boy had not been taken from us forever as I had
said to myself so often since that telegram had come.

He is gone from this life, but he is waiting for us beyond