ent."

We shook hands, saluted, and went out. And, as I shut the door, I
heard the old enthusiast call out to someone who must have been in
an inner room: "I've two gems of boys there--straight from school.
Bless my soul, England'll win through."

Sec.3

But, lack-a-day, here's the trouble with me. My moments of
exaltation have always been fleeting. Just as in the old school-days
I would leave Radley's room, brimful of lofty resolutions, and fall
away almost immediately into littleness again, so now I soon allowed
the lamp of enthusiasm, lit by the Colonel, to grow very dim.

It was ridicule of the fine old visionary that destroyed his power.
"Hallo, here come two more of the Colonel's blue-eyed boys," laughed
the officers of our new battalion the first time we came into their
view. And "The old man's mounted his hobby again," said they, after
any lecture in which he alluded to Youth and Enthusiasm.

Yet the Colonel was right, and the scoffers wrong. The Colonel was a
poet who could listen and hear how the heart of the world was
beating; the scoffers were prosaic cattle who scarcely knew that the
world had a heart at all. He turned us, if only for a moment, into
young knights of high ideals, while they made us sorry, conceited
young knaves.

You shall know what knaves we were.

So far from being enthusiastic over parades and field days, we found
them most detestably dull and longed for the pleasures that followed
the order to dismiss. And after the Dismiss we were utterly happy.

It was happiness to walk the streets in our new uniforms, and to
take the salutes of the Tommies, the important boy-scouts, and the
military-minded gutter urchins. I longed to go home on leave, so
that in company with my mother I could walk through the world
saluted at every twenty paces, and thus she should see me in all my
glory. And when one day I strolled with her past a Hussar sentry who
brought his sword flashing in the sun to the salute, I felt I had
seldom experienced anything so satisfying.

I was secretly elated, too, in possessing a soldier servant to wait
on me hand and foot--almost to bath me. I spoke with a concealed
relish of "my agents," and loved to draw cheques on Cox and Co. I
looked forward to Sunday Church Parade, for there I could wear my
sword. It was my grandfather's sword, and I'm afraid I thought less
of the romance of bearing it in defence of the Britain that he loved
and the France where he lay buried t