y in mid-August, I found a comfortable seat on a slope of sandy soil
sown with grass and weeds in the clearing back of Kartabo laboratory.
I was shaded only by a few leaves of a low walnut-like sapling, yet
there was not the slightest hint of oppressive heat. It might have
been a warm August day in New England or Canada, except for the
softness of the air.

In my little cleared glade there was no plant which would be wholly
out of place on a New England country hillside. With debotanized
vision I saw foliage of sumach, elm, hickory, peach, and alder, and
the weeds all about were as familiar as those of any New Jersey
meadow. The most abundant flowers were Mazaruni daisies, cheerful
little pale primroses, and close to me, fairly overhanging the paper
as I wrote, was the spindling button-weed, a wanderer from the
States, with its clusters of tiny white blossoms bouqueted in the
bracts of its leaves.

A few yards down the hillside was a clump of real friends--the rich
green leaves of vervain, that humble little weed, sacred in turn to
the Druids, the Romans, and the early Christians, and now brought
inadvertently in some long-past time, in an overseas shipment, and
holding its own in this breathing-space of the jungle. I was so
interested by this discovery of a superficial northern flora, that I
began to watch for other forms of temperate-appearing life, and for a
long time my ear found nothing out of harmony with the plants. The low
steady hum of abundant insects was so constant that it required
conscious effort to disentangle it from silence. Every few seconds
there arose the cadence of a passing bee or fly, the one low and deep,
the other shrill and penetrating. And now, just as I had become wholly
absorbed in this fascinating game,--the kind of game which may at any
moment take a worth-while scientific turn,--it all dimmed and the
entire picture shifted and changed. I doubt if any one who has been at
a modern battle-front can long sit with closed eyes in a midsummer
meadow and not have his blood leap as scene after scene is brought
back to him. Three bees and a fly winging their way past, with the
rise and fall of their varied hums, were sufficient to renew vividly
for me the blackness of night over the sticky mud of Souville, and to
cloud for a moment the scent of clover and dying grass, with that
terrible sickly sweet odor of human flesh in an old shell-hole. In
such unexpected ways do we link peace and war--suspen