omrade who had fallen on No-man's-land.
Oh, she could see his white beautiful face and wonderful eyes as he did
it! What a thing to be the sister of such a hero! And he hadn't thought
it worth while writing about. His letter was full of other
things--little intimate things that they two had known and loved
together in the dear old cloudless days of a century ago.

"I've been thinking of the daffodils in the garden at Ingleside," he
wrote. "By the time you get this they will be out, blowing there under
that lovely rosy sky. Are they really as bright and golden as ever,
Rilla? It seems to me that they must be dyed red with blood--like our
poppies here. And every whisper of spring will be falling as a violet
in Rainbow Valley.

"There is a young moon tonight--a slender, silver, lovely thing hanging
over these pits of torment. Will you see it tonight over the maple
grove?

"I'm enclosing a little scrap of verse, Rilla. I wrote it one evening
in my trench dug-out by the light of a bit of candle--or rather it came
to me there--I didn't feel as if I were writing it--something seemed to
use me as an instrument. I've had that feeling once or twice before,
but very rarely and never so strongly as this time. That was why I sent
it over to the London Spectator. It printed it and the copy came today.
I hope you'll like it. It's the only poem I've written since I came
overseas."

The poem was a short, poignant little thing. In a month it had carried
Walter's name to every corner of the globe. Everywhere it was
copied--in metropolitan dailies and little village weeklies--in
profound reviews and "agony columns," in Red Cross appeals and
Government recruiting propaganda. Mothers and sisters wept over it,
young lads thrilled to it, the whole great heart of humanity caught it
up as an epitome of all the pain and hope and pity and purpose of the
mighty conflict, crystallized in three brief immortal verses. A
Canadian lad in the Flanders trenches had written the one great poem of
the war. "The Piper," by Pte. Walter Blythe, was a classic from its
first printing.

Rilla copied it in her diary at the beginning of an entry in which she
poured out the story of the hard week that had just passed.

"It has been such a dreadful week," she wrote, "and even though it is
over and we know that it was all a mistake that does not seem to do
away with the bruises left by it. And yet it has in some ways been a
very wonderful week and I have had so