e convalescent. A few lay in a stupor. She provided
ten or a dozen soldiers with their pleasure, and they lighted up and
were well under way. She had so many patients that day that she was not
watching the individual man in her general distribution. She came half
way down the car, and held out her store to a soldier without looking at
him. He glanced up and grinned. The men in the bunks around him laughed
heartily. Then she looked down at him. He was flapping the two stumps of
his arms and was smiling. His hands had been blown off. She put the
cigarette in his mouth and lit it for him. Only his hands were gone.
Comradeship was left for him, and here was the lighted cigarette
expressing that comradeship.

WAS IT REAL?

The man was an old-time friend. In the days of our youth, we had often
worked together. He was small and nervous, with a quick eye. He always
wore me down after a few hours, because he was restless and untiring. He
was named Romeyn Rossiter--one of those well-born names. We had met in
times before the advent of the telescopic lens, and he used a box
camera, tuned to a fiftieth of a second. Together we snapped polo
ponies, coming at full tilt after the ball, riding each other off, while
he would stand between the goal-posts, as they zigzagged down on him. I
had to shove him out of the way, at the last tick, when the hoofs were
loud. I often wondered if those ponies didn't look suddenly large and
imminent on the little glass rectangle into which he was peering. That
was the kind of person he was. He was glued to his work. He was a
curious man, because that nerve of fear, which is well developed in most
of us, was left out of his make-up. No credit to him. It merely wasn't
there. He was color-blind to danger. He had spent his life everywhere by
bits, so he had the languages. I used to admire that in him, the way he
could career along with a Frenchman, and exchange talk with a German
waiter: high speed, and a kind of racy quality.

I used to write the text around his pictures, captions underneath them,
and then words spilled out over the white paper between his six by tens.
We published in the country life magazines. They gave generous big
display pages. In those days people used to read what I wrote, because
they wanted to find out about the pictures, and the pictures were fine.
You must have seen Rossiter's work--caribou, beavers, Walter Travis
coming through with a stroke, and Holcombe Ward giving