one corner.

That evening at supper Mr. Wheeler gave his wife a full account
of the court hearing, so that she could write it to Claude. Mrs.
Wheeler, always more a school-teacher than a housekeeper, wrote a
rapid, easy hand, and her long letters to Claude reported all the
neighbourhood doings. Mr. Wheeler furnished much of the material
for them. Like many long-married men he had fallen into the way
of withholding neighbourhood news from his wife. But since Claude
went away he reported to her everything in which he thought the
boy would be interested. As she laconically said in one of her
letters:

"Your father talks a great deal more at home than formerly, and
sometimes I think he is trying to take your place."

X

On the first day of July Claude Wheeler found himself in the fast
train from Omaha, going home for a week's leave. The uniform was
still an unfamiliar sight in July, 1917. The first draft was not
yet called, and the boys who had rushed off and enlisted were in
training camps far away. Therefore a redheaded young man with
long straight legs in puttees, and broad, energetic,
responsible-looking shoulders in close-fitting khaki, made a
conspicuous figure among the passengers. Little boys and young
girls peered at him over the tops of seats, men stopped in the
aisle to talk to him, old ladies put on their glasses and studied
his clothes, his bulky canvas hold-all, and even the book he kept
opening and forgetting to read.

The country that rushed by him on each side of the track was more
interesting to his trained eye than the pages of any book. He was
glad to be going through it at harvest,--the season when it is
most itself. He noted that there was more corn than usual,--much
of the winter wheat had been weather killed, and the fields were
ploughed up in the spring and replanted in maize. The pastures
were already burned brown, the alfalfa was coming green again
after its first cutting. Binders and harvesters were abroad in
the wheat and oats, gathering the soft-breathing billows of grain
into wide, subduing arms. When the train slowed down for a
trestle in a wheat field, harvesters in blue shirts and overalls
and wide straw hats stopped working to wave at the passengers.
Claude turned to the old man in the opposite seat. "When I see
those fellows, I feel as if I'd wakened up in the wrong clothes."

His neighbour looked pleased and smiled. "That the kind of
uniform you're accustomed to?"

"I su