athlete, serving in the American air forces in Italy, before
his fatal flight wrote this letter, so full of the strength and
simplicity of a great soldier:

"What little I have to give to my country I give without reservation.
If there ever was a righteous cause it is ours, and I am proud to have
worked and died for it.

"Pray God this war will be over soon and that it will be the last war.

"I leave you with a smile on my lips and a heart full of love for you
all. God bless you and keep you."

STURGIS.

A BOY OF PERUGIA

In the year 1500, Raphael was a boy of eighteen in Perugia working and
studying with the master painter Perugino. Did the city itself, free
on its hill top, looking afar over undulating mountains and great
valleys, implant in the sensitive soul of Raphael a love of beauty and
a vision that made him become one of the greatest painters of the
world? Perugia can never be forgotten, for the boy Raphael once lived,
worked, and studied there.

In the year 1915 Enzo Valentini was a boy of eighteen in Perugia. He
was a high school boy and his father was mayor of the city. One of his
teachers says he was an unusually brilliant scholar, with remarkable
artistic gifts. Did the city and its beautiful surroundings open his
soul to the vision of love and tenderness for his "little mother" and
of the duty that called him while but a boy in the high school to serve
and, if need be, die for his country?

When Italy entered the war, he gave up his studies, dropped his pen and
his brushes, volunteered as a private, and was soon fighting with his
countrymen in the Alps.

Certainly his soul was responsive to beauty in nature; for in the midst
of war and war's alarms, he found peace of spirit in the wonderful
Alpine country. He writes, "The longer I am here, the more I love the
mountains. The spell they weave does not come so quickly as that of
the sea, but I think it is deeper and more enduring. Every passing
moment, every cloud, every morning mist clothes the mountains in a
beauty so great that even the coarsest of our brave soldiers stop to
admire it. It may be for only an instant but this is enough to prove
that the soul never forgets its heavenly birth even though it be the
soul of an uneducated peasant, imprisoned in the roughest shell. The
days pass one after another calmly, serenely. It seems as if the
autumn ought never to end. The divine and solemn peace of the nights
is beyond the