nt for Wallace
to broach the subject upon which he had been thinking deeply for many
days.

"Uncle," he said, as they sat down to their pretty tea-table in the
sun-flooded dining-room. "I'd like to go on a farm this Spring. That
Ford place below the mill is for sale, and the Browns are talking of
buying it. You've always wanted to retire on a farm and I could start
the work and----"

He paused, interrupted by his mother's dismayed exclamation. "Wallace!
You with your prospects to settle down here and be a common farmer!
Surely you don't mean it!"

"Elinor, don't be foolish!" snapped her brother, looking up from a
dreary paragraph concerning a British reverse that was attempting to
appear as a strategic move. "You might be glad to have him a common
farmer, as you call it. And as for his prospects, I don't see what
they are, to tell you the truth."

"Don't you agree with me, Uncle?" cried Wallace ingratiatingly. "These
old chaps here farm like Noah before the flood. I'd like to show some
of them an up-to-date way of managing stock." But his uncle was not
capable of agreeing with anybody. His sister's tears forbade that he
put his duty before his nephew, and it fairly broke the old man's heart
that Wallace needed any one to suggest that he enlist. In times of
peace he would have sympathised with the boy's desire to be a farmer,
and he approved highly of Christina, but just now he could listen to
nothing but the cry of Belgium.

"What's the use of talking a lot of rot!" he burst forth irritably.
"You needn't ask my advice about farming! Before you'd get your crop
off your farm next Fall the Kaiser of Germany would have everything to
say about it. How will you like it when you have to pass over most of
your profits to him and his War Lords? Here we are planning and
scheming and all the time we're living in a Fool's Paradise, with the
enemy at our door! We are marrying and giving in marriage, while the
floods are pouring in upon us! Yes, go farming to-morrow if you like!
It'll only be for a few months anyway. The Philistines are upon us!"

Matters were always serious when the Doctor took to quoting Scripture,
and Mrs. Sutherland reached protectingly for her cut-glass spoon tray
as his fist came down with a crash upon the table.

The result of the unhappy episode was that Wallace tramped sulkily up
to his room after supper, and when his distressed mother went up to
comfort him, she found him packing h