ad
of carks and cares into the first ditch, and live in freedom ever after!

To Stephen La Mothe's four-and-twenty with the spirit of eighteen the
world of that May day was God's good world, and what better could it be
than that! If a full-leaved cherry tree, its ripening clusters rosy
red and waxen yellow against the dense greenery, flung shade across the
road he paused in his tramp, squared his shoulders, and drank a deep
breath of the cooler air; if the blazing sun sucked up a subtle, acrid
smell from the hot dust stirred by his feet he snuffed it up greedily
and found it good to live. A hawk in the air, a thrush whistling from
a hazel bush as only a thrush can whistle, the glorious yellow of a
break of whin, all were a delight.

"Heigh ho! Love is my life!
Live I in loving, and love I to live!"

he sang, and broke into a whistle almost as blithe as the thrush itself
that he might think more freely. Commines' gibe had come back to him,
and for pastime he would make a verse of his love song, let Ursula de
Vesc's eyes be blue, grey, or black!

"Live I in loving, and love I to live,"

was a good line, a line Francois Villon himself could not have
bettered, but how should the next line run?

"Heigho! Sweetest of strife!"

Strife! The word jarred the context, but where would he get a better?
Wife? Rife? Worse! both worse! Sweetest of strife--of strife--strife,

"Winning the dearest that life can give!"

No! that was not good, not good at all: Villon would have turned the
rhyme better than that. But then Villon, wild rogue though he was, was
a poet. The dearest life can give--the dearest? What was the dearest
life could give? As the question, idly asked, fastened on his mind his
whistle sobered into silence, and he plodded on through the dust,
seeing neither the sunshine nor the shade.

France came first, the King had said, and then had made it clear that
he was France. Was the King's service the dearest thing life could
give? In times of peace, when the millstones and the hearts of men
alike grind placidly, patriotism is a cold virtue, and even in the hot
passion of war it is often the magnetism of the individual man--the
personal leader--who wakens the enthusiasm of desperate courage rather
than the cause in whose name men die. Roland, La Mothe told himself,
might have roused such an enthusiasm, or Coeur de Lion, or Joan of Arc,
but never that fierce corpse of Valmy. And if the