ch we had parted lay close to a gloomy
monastic structure, centuries old, that from a height dominated the
little town. The garden and the structure were symbols of what was
most salient in that country--the ancient church braced against
progress, with its power broken in no way, and on the other hand of
a life interpenetrated with things graceful and refined, with art,
music, and poetry, but seamed, too, with frivolity and what makes
for the pleasures of sense. My two friends also were in their way
types,--the cowled Franciscan, aloof in a mediaeval seclusion though
he breathed nineteenth-century air, and the dancer whom I encountered
in the vale, above which the Watzmann upholds forever its solemn
mitre. But they were good fellows both, my comrade in and my comrade
out. The monk's heart was not too shrivelled to flow with human
kindness, and the dancer had not unlearned in the glare of the
foot-lights the graces of a gentleman.

I profess to be a man of peace. Through training, environment, and
calling I ought to be so, and yet there is a fibre in any make-up
which has always throbbed strangely to the drum. Is it perhaps
a streak of heredity? In almost every noteworthy war since the
foundation of the country, men of my line have borne a part. I count
ancestors who stood among the minute-men at Concord bridge.
Another was in the redoubt at Bunker Hill. In the earlier time two
great-great-grandfathers went out against Montcalm and were good
soldiers in the Old French War. Still earlier a progenitor, whose name
I bear, faced the Indian peril in King Philip's War, and was among
the slain in the gloomy Sudbury fight Perhaps it is a trace from these
ancient forbears still lingering in my blood that will respond when
the trumpets blow, however I strive to repress it, and it has given me
qualms.

I was not easy in mind when I stood on the tower of St. Stephen's
Church, in Vienna more than forty years ago, to find that what
I sought most eagerly in the superb landscape was not the steep
Kahlenberg, not the plumy woods of Schoenbrunn, not the Danube pouring
grandly eastward, nor the picturesque city at my feet; but the little
hamlets just outside the suburbs, and the wide-stretching grain-field
close by, turning yellow under the July sun, where Napoleon fought the
battles of Aspern and Wagram. Nor was I quite easy when I set out to
climb the St. Gotthard Pass, to find that although the valley below
Airolo was so green with f