the last second. With that Josef exploded throaty language and leaning
sidewise made a dive at the frog. Aristophe, unbalanced with emotion and
Josef's swift movement shot from his poise at the end of the little
craft, and landed, in a foot of water, flat on his buck, and the frog
seized that second to jump on his stomach.

I never heard an Indian really laugh before that day. The hills
resounded with Josef's shouts. We laughed, Josef and I, till we were
weak, and for a good minute Aristophe sprawled in the lake, with the
frog anchored as if till Kingdom come on his middle, and howled lusty
howls while we laughed. Then Josef fished the frog and got him off the
Tin Lizzie's lungs. And Aristophe, weeping, scrambled into the boat. And
as we went home in the cool forest twilight, up the portage by the
rushing, noisy rapids, Josef, walking before us, carrying the
landing-net full of frogs' legs, shook with laughter every little while
again, as Aristophe, his wet strong young legs, the only section of him
showing, toiled ahead up the winding thread of a trail, carrying the
inverted canoe on his head.

It was this adventure which came to me and seized me and carried me a
thousand miles northward into Canadian forest as I looked at the frogs'
legs on my plate at the Cosmic Club, and did not listen to my cousin,
the Colonel, talking military tactics.

The mental review took an eighth of the time it has taken me to tell it.
But as I shook off my dream of the woods, I realized that, while
Thornton still talked, he had got out of his uninteresting rut into his
interesting one. Without hearing what he said I knew that from the look
of the men's faces. Each man's eyes were bright, through a manner of
mistiness, and there was a sudden silence which was perhaps what had
recalled me.

"It's a war which is making a new standard of courage," spoke the young
Governor in the gentle tone which goes so oddly and so pleasantly with
his bull-dog jaw. "It looks as if we were going to be left with a world
where heroism is the normal thing," spoke the Governor.

"Heroism--yes," said Bobby, and I knew with satisfaction that he was off
on his own line, the line he does not fancy, the line where few can
distance him. "Heroism!" repeated Bobby, "It's all around out there. And
it crops out--" he begun to smile--"in unsuspected places, from varied
impulses."

He was working his way to an anecdote. The men at the table, their
chairs twisted toward