agerly
I grasped the axe and with what ease I hit, not twice, but half a
dozen times in the same place--until the stump yielded. This victory
was all the sweeter to me because it came right after our sports day
when I had entered every available contest, from the nail-driving
competition to the fat woman's race, and had never even been mentioned
as among those present!

We closed our cottage on August 24. That day all nature conspired to
make us feel sorry that we were leaving. A gentle breeze blew over the
lake and rasped its surface into dancing ripples that glittered in the
sun. Blueberry Island seemed to stand out clear and bold and
beckoning. White-winged boats lay over against the horizon and the
_chug-chug_ of a motor-boat came at intervals in a lull of the breeze.
The more tender varieties of the trees had begun to show a trace of
autumn coloring, just a hint and a promise of the ripened beauty of
the fall--if we would only stay!

Before the turn in the road hid it from sight we stopped and looked
back at the "Kee-am Cottage"--my last recollection of it is of the
boarded windows, which gave it the blinded look of a dead thing, and
of the ferns which grandma had brought from the big woods beyond the
railway track and planted all round it, and which had grown so quickly
and so rank that they seemed to fill in all the space under the
cottage, and with their pale-green, feathery fringe, to be trying to
lift it up into the sunshine above the trees. Instinctively we felt
that we had come to the end of a very pleasant chapter in our life as
a family; something had disturbed the peaceful quiet of our lives;
somewhere a drum was beating and a fife was calling!

Not a word of this was spoken, but Jack suddenly put it all into
words, for he turned to me and asked quickly, "Mother, when will I be
eighteen?"

Gay, as the skater who blithely whirls
To the place of the dangerous ice!
Content, as the lamb who nibbles the grass
While the butcher sets the price!
So content and gay were the boys at play
In the nations near and far,
When munition kings and diplomats
Cried, "War! War!! War!!!"

CHAPTER II

WORKING IN!

The day after we went to the city I got my first real glimpse of war!
It was the white face of our French neighbor. His wife and two little
girls had gone to France a month before the war broke out, and were
visiting his family in a village on the Marne. Since the outbrea