horus:

"Wi' me bundle on me shoulder, sure, there's not a man that's bolder--
I am leavin' dear old Ireland without warnin'.
For I've lately took the notion for to cross the briny ocean,
An' I'm off for Philadelphia in the mornin'."

The smile on the face of the first boy spread to a grin under its covering
of gauze. "I'm off for Philadelphia, too," he mumbled, thickly, and the
eyes that looked into Sheila's for a few last nebulous seconds showed all
the comfortable security of a child's.

They were hard at it for another hour, and while Sheila O'Leary's hands
flew from sterilizer to ether cone, from handing instruments and holding
forceps to tying sutures and packing wounds, her mind was busy with
something that lay far beyond. To this girl, who had come across to do her
bit, life had become a jumble of paradoxes. She had come to give, out of
the bounty of her skill and her womanhood; instead she had received far
more abundantly from the largess of universal brotherhood and sacrifice.
She had come to minister, and she had been ministered unto by every piece
of human wreckage swept across the door-sill of the hospital. She had
thought to dispense life, and to her ever-increasing wonder she had been
given a life so boundless that it reached beyond all previous dreams of
space or time. She was learning what thousands had been learning since the
war began, those who had thrown their fortunes into its crucible, and
that is that if anything comes out at all, it comes out in the form of
spirit and not of flesh.

Back in the old days at the sanitarium she had felt herself bound only to
the problems and emergencies of war. It had never occurred to her then
that in an incredibly short time she would be bothering about matters of
adjustment afterward. With peace already on the horizon, she was troubled
a hundredfold more than she had been when indefinite war was the promise
for the future. From the beginning she had marveled at the buoyancy and
optimism of the men who were focusing their lives within the limits of
each day. Many of them never thought in terms of more than twenty-four
hours; often it was less. They had learned the knack of intensive living.
World-old truths were flashed into their minds like spot-lights; friends
were made and lost in a few hours; eternity was visioned and compassed in
a minute. The last words Jerry Donoghue of Ward 7-A had said before he
went west came back to Sheila with a curious