if I can do something great to bring it about, it will give me real
happiness."

"It will, old man, it will. I'm sure of it," cried Cleary, as he took
his leave of Sam in front of the hotel. "Let me know what steamer
you're going by as soon as you get orders, and I'll try to manage it
to get a passage on her too. They often carry newspaper men on our
transports."

On the following day Sam went to visit his uncle at Slowburgh, a small
sea-port of some four thousand inhabitants lying several miles away
from the railroad. The journey in the train occupied six hours or more,
and Sam spent the time in learning the Castalian language in a handbook
he had bought in town. He had already taken lessons in the language at
East Point and was beginning to be fairly proficient. He alighted at
the nearest station to Slowburgh and entered the rather shabby omnibus
which was standing waiting. Sam felt lonely. There was nothing military
about the station and no uniform in sight. He no longer wore a uniform
himself, and the landscape was painfully civilian. Finally the horses
started and the 'bus moved slowly up the road. Sam was impatient. His
fellow countrymen were risking their lives thousands of miles away, and
here he was, creeping along a country road in the disguise of a private
citizen, far away from the post of duty and danger. He looked with
disgust at the plowmen in the fields busily engaged in preparing the
soil for next year's grain.

"What a mean, poor-spirited lot," he thought. "Here they are, following
their wretched plows without a thought of the brave soldiers who are
defending their country and themselves so many leagues away. It is the
soldier, suffering from hunger and fever and falling on the battlefield
in the agony of death, who makes it possible for these fellows to spend
their days in pleasant exercise in the fields. The soldier bears
civilization on his back, he supports all the rest, he is the pedestal
which bears without complaint the civilian as an idle ornament. The
soldier, in short, is the real man, the only perfect product of
creation."

And his heart was filled with thankfulness that he had selected the
career of a soldier and that there never could be any doubt of his
usefulness to the world. The only other occupants of the omnibus were
two men--one of them a commercial traveler, and the other an aged
resident of Slowburgh who had been at the county town for the