ecruiting
stations. There was a swing and a sway about those old tunes that the
young fellows couldn't resist.

The pipers would begin to skirl and the drums to beat in a square,
maybe, or near the railway station. And every time the skirling of
the pipes would bring the crowd. Then the pipers would march, when
the crowd was big enough, and lead the way always to the recruiting
place. And once they were there the young fellows who weren't "quite
ready to decide" and the others who were just plain slackers, willing
to let better men die for them, found it mighty hard to keep from going
on the wee rest of the way that the pipers had left them to make alone!

It was wonderful work my band did, and when the returns came to me I
felt like the Pied Piper! Yes I did, indeed!

I did not travel with my band. That would have been a waste of
effort. There was work for both of us to do, separately. I was booked
for a tour of Britain, and everywhere I went I spoke, and urged the
young men to enlist. I made as many speeches as I could, in every
town and city that I visited, and I made special trips to many. I
thought, and there were those who agreed with me, that I could, it
might be, reach audiences another speaker, better trained than I, no
doubt, in this sort of work, would not touch.

So there was I, without official standing, going about, urging every
man who could to don khaki. I talked wherever and whenever I could
get an audience together, and I began then the habit of making
speeches in the theatres, after my performance, that I have not yet
given up. I talked thus to the young men.

"If you don't do your duty now," I told them, "you may live to be old
men. But even if you do, you will regret it! Yours will be a
sorrowful old age. In the years to come, mayhap, there'll be a wee
grandchild nestling on your knee that'll circle its little arms about
your neck and look into your wrinkled face, and ask you:

"'How old are you, Grandpa? You're a very old man.'

"How will you answer that bairn's question?" So I asked the young
men. And then I answered for them: "I don't know how old I am, but I
am so old that I can remember the great war."

"And then"--I told them, the young men who were wavering--"and then
will come the question that you will always have to dread--when you
have won through to the old age that may be yours in safety if you
shirk now! For the bairn will ask you, straightaway: 'Did _you_ fight
in the great