th my babies."

Then his jaw set, and I shall never forget the profile of his face as
that set look came back and once again he became the captain of a
machine-gun company.

Then there was the lone church service that my friend Clarke held one
evening at a crossroads of France. He had held seven services that
Sunday, one in a machine-gun company's dugout, with six men; another
with a group of a dozen men in a front-line trench; another with
several officers in an officers' dugout; another with a battery outfit
who were "On Call," expecting orders to send over a few shells; another
with several men out in No Man's Land, on the sunny side of an old
upturned mass of tree roots; one in a listening-post, and finally this
service with a lone sentry at a crossroads.

"But how did you do it?" I asked.

"I just saw him there," Clarke replied, "and he looked lonely, and I
walked up and said: 'How'd you like to have me read a little out of the
Book?'

"'Fine!' he said.

"Then I prayed with him, standing there at the crossroads, and I asked
him if he didn't want to pray. He was a church boy back home, and he
prayed as fine a prayer as ever I heard. Then we sang a hymn together.
It was 'Jesus, Lover of My Soul,' and neither of us can sing much, but
as I look back on it, it was the sweetest music that I ever had a part
in making. The only thing I didn't do was take up a collection.
Outside of that, it was just as if we had gone through a regular church
service at home. I even preached a little to him. No, not just
preached, but talked to him about the Master."

"Did you even go so far with your lone one-man congregation as to have
a benediction?" I asked him.

"No, I just said what was in my heart when we were through, 'God bless
and keep you, boy,' and went on."

"I never heard a finer benediction than that, old man," I replied with
feeling.

And the silhouette of that one Y. M. C. A. secretary holding a
religious service with a lone sentry of a Sunday evening, bringing back
to the lad's memory sacred things of home and church and the Christ,
giving him a new hold on the bigger, better things, bringing the Christ
out to him there on that road, that silhouette is mine to keep forever
close to my heart. I shall see that and shall smile in my soul over it
when eternity calls, and shall thank God for its sweetening influence
in my life.

And so this comfort may come to the mothers and fathers of America,
that thro