ruly, Leonidas. In the last analysis it's a mere matter of
food, clothes and shelter, with perhaps a cigarette or two. In Mexico,
when we advanced from Vera Cruz to the capital, it was often very cold
on the mountains. I can remember coming in from some battle, aching with
weariness and cold, but after I had eaten good food and basked half
an hour before a fire I would feel as if I owned the earth. Physical
comfort, carried to the very highest degree, produces mental comfort
also."

"Sound words, Hector. The starved, the cold and the shelterless can
never be happy. God knows that I am no advocate of war, although it is
my trade. It is a terrible thing for people to kill one another, but it
does grind you down to the essentials. Because it is war you and I have
an acute sense of luxury, lying here against a stone fence, smoking a
couple of cigarettes."

"That is, Leonidas, we are happy when we have attained what we have
needed a long time, and which we have been a long time without. It has
occurred to me that the cave-man, in all his primitive nakedness, must
have had some thrilling moments, moments of pleasures of the body, the
mind and the imagination allied, which we modern beings cannot feel."

"To what moments do you allude, Hector?"

"Suppose that he has just eluded a monstrous saber-toothed tiger, and
has slipped into his cave by the opening, entirely too small for any
great beast of prey. He is in his home. A warm fire is burning on a
flat stone. His wife--beautiful to him--is cooking savory meats for
him. Around the walls are his arms and their supplies. They eat placidly
while the huge tiger from which he has escaped by a foot or less roars
and glowers without. The contrast between the danger and that house,
which is the equivalent to a modern palace, comes home to him with a
thrill more keen and penetrating than anything we can ever feel.

"The man and his wife eat their evening meal, and retire to their bed
of dry leaves in the corner. They fall asleep while the frenzied and
ferocious tiger is still snarling and growling. They know he cannot get
at them, and his gnashings and roarings are merely a lullaby, soothing
them to the sweetest of slumbers. You could not duplicate that in the
age in which we live, Leonidas."

"No, Hector, we couldn't. But, as for me, I can spare such thrills. It
seems to me that we have plenty of danger of our own just now. I must
say, however, that you put these matters in a fi