fed in the fertile dust and quiet among old prints,
geological specimens, antlers, pewter, bed-warmers, amphorae, and books.
The proprietor presided over the dim litter of his world, bowed, pensive,
and silent, suggesting in his aloofness not indifference but a retired
sadness for those for whom the mysteries could be made plain, but who are
wilful in their blindness, and so cannot be helped.

I came upon a copy of _Walden_, in its earliest Camelot dress (price
sixpence), and remembered that one who was not there had once said he was
looking for it in that edition. I turned to the last page and read: "Only
that day dawns to which we are awake..."

I reserved the book for him at once, though knowing I could not give it
to him. But what is the good of cold reason? Are we awake in such dawns
as we now witness? Or has there been no dawn yet because we are only
restless in our sleep? It might be either way, and in such a perplexity
reason cannot help us. I thought that perhaps I might now be stirring, on
the point of actually rousing. There, in any case, was the evidence of
that fugitive spark of the early summer of 1914 still imprisoned in its
crystal, proof that the world had experienced a dawn or two. An entirely
unreasonable serenity possessed me--perhaps because I was not fully
roused--because of the indestructibility of those few voiceless hopes we
cherish that seem as fugitive as the glint in the crystal ball, hopes
without which our existence would have no meaning, for if we lost them we
should know the universe was a witless jest, with nobody to laugh at it.

"I want this book," I said to the shopman.

"I know," he answered, without looking up. "I've kept it for you."

XIII. News from the Front

OCTOBER 12, 1918. My remembrance of the man, when I got his letter from
France--and it was approved, apparently, by one of his regimental
officers, for a censorial signature, was upon its envelope--was a
regrettable and embarrassing check to my impulse to cry Victory. I found
it hard, nevertheless, in the moment when victory was near, to forgive
the curious lapse that letter betrayed in a fellow who did not try for
exemption but volunteered for the infantry, and afterwards declined a
post which would have saved him from the trenches. He was the sort of
curious soldier that we civilians will never understand. He aided the
enemy he was fighting. His platoon officer reported that fact as
characteristic and admirabl