w York of Anno Domini 1918.

Then, in an instant, the Hill of today vanishes. The show windows of
the great shops, gorgeous with display, the vast hotels, the clubs, the
fluttering Starry Banners and Tricolours and Union Jacks, the stirring
posters that bring the heart into the throat and send the hand down into
the pocket for Liberty Loan or Red Cross, the line of creeping
motor-cars on the asphalt, the swarming sidewalks, swim away in a mist,
and in their place there is rolling woodland, and a silver stream, and
in the distance, a great white house. The years drop away. A boy of
eight, curled up in a big chair, is dipping for the first time into the
pages of his country's history. His face is flushed, his eyes are
bright. With that vividness that belongs to impressionable childhood,
and to no other period of life he is seeing bits of the past that he
will never forget. To the end of his days the rhetorical phrases will
ring in his ears and the letters forming them will dance before his
eyes.

Boston Common. The line of defiant Minute Men drawn up. The curt order,
"Disperse, ye Rebels!" and the volley that followed so closely upon the
words. _This was the first blood shed in the American Revolution._ The
morning of an impending battle: the Continental leader exhorting his
men. "_There are the Red Coats! We must beat them today, or Molly
Stork's a widow!_" Again, the boy is being awakened from sleep in his
bed in a quiet street of eighteenth-century Philadelphia. The voice of
the watchman is crying the hour and the thrilling tidings. "_Two o'clock
in the morning! All's well, and Cornwallis has surrendered!_"

Here, on the Murray Hill of May, 1918, the man becomes the boy once
more. Perhaps the suggestion comes from one of the women's faces that
are looking straight at him, beseechingly and rebukingly, from the
posters that line the Avenue; the face of "The Greatest Mother in the
World," or that younger face beyond which the eye perceives dim outlines
of marching men in khaki. The veil with the Red Cross is transformed
into a coiffure of powdered hair, crowning the countenance and figure of
a _grande dame_ of the eighteenth century. She is standing before the
doorway of a great country house, smiling and beckoning welcome, and at
the invitation officers on horseback halt the column of rapidly moving
men. The soldiers break ranks and throw themselves down in the shade of
the trees. The officers advance bowing, and enter