You never knew me to fail you yet,
And I'll be back in a year, a year."
'Twas at Mons he fell, in the first attack;
For so they said, and their eyes were dim;
But I laughed in their faces: "He'll come back,
Will my Jim."

Now, we'd been wedded for twenty year,
And Jim was the only one we'd had;
So when I whispered in father's ear,
He wouldn't believe me--would you, dad?
There! I must hurry . . . hear him cry?
My new little baby. . . . See! that's him.
What are we going to call him? Why,
Jim, just Jim.

Jim! For look at him laughing there
In the same old way in his tiny cot,
With his rosy cheeks and his sunny hair,
And look, just look . . . his beauty spot
In the selfsame place. . . . Oh, I can't explain,
And of course you think it's a mother's whim,
But I know, I know it's my boy again,
Same wee Jim.

Just come back as he said he would;
Come with his love and his heart of glee.
Oh, I cried and I cried, but the Lord was good;
From the shadow of Death he set Jim free.
So I'll have him all over again, you see.
Can you wonder my mother-heart's a-brim?
Oh, how happy we're going to be!
Aren't we, Jim?

II

In Picardy,

January 1915.

The road lies amid a malevolent heath. It seems to lead us right into
the clutch of the enemy; for the star-shells, that at first were
bursting overhead, gradually encircle us. The fields are strangely
sinister; the splintered trees are like giant toothpicks. There is a
lisping and a twanging overhead.

As we wait at the door of the dugout that serves as a first-aid dressing
station, I gaze up into that mysterious dark, so alive with musical
vibrations. Then a small shadow detaches itself from the greater
shadow, and a gray-bearded sentry says to me: "You'd better come in out
of the bullets."

So I keep under cover, and presently they bring my load. Two men drip
with sweat as they carry their comrade. I can see that they all three
belong to the Foreign Legion. I think for a moment of Saxon Dane. How
strange if some day I should carry him! Half fearfully I look at my
passenger, but he is a black man. Such things only happen in fiction.

This is what I have written of the finest troops in the A