ng that I really enjoy!"

Another woman told of how much she had given up for the Patriotic
Fund; that she had determined not to give one Christmas present, and
had given up all the societies to which she had belonged, even the
Missionary Society, and was giving it all to the Red Cross. "I will
not even give a present to the boy who brings the paper," she declared
with conviction. Whether or not the boy's present ever reached the
Red Cross, I do not know. But ninety-five per cent of the giving was
real, honest, hard, sacrificing giving. Elevator-boys, maids,
stenographers gave a percentage of their earnings, and gave it
joyously. They like to give, but they do not like to have it taken
away from them by an employer, who thereby gets the credit of the
gift. The Red Cross mite-boxes into which children put their candy
money, while not enriching the Red Cross to any large extent, trained
the children to take some share in the responsibility; and one
enthusiastic young citizen, who had been operated on for appendicitis,
proudly exhibited his separated appendix, preserved in alcohol, at so
much per look, and presented the proceeds to the Red Cross.

The war came home to the finest of our people first. It has not
reached them all yet, but it is working in, like the frost into the
cellars when the thermometer shows forty degrees below zero. Many a
cellar can stand a week of this--but look out for the second! Every
day it comes to some one.

"I don't see why we are always asked to give," one woman said
gloomily, when the collector asked her for a monthly subscription to
the Red Cross. "Every letter that goes out of the house has a stamp on
it--and we write a queer old lot of letters, and I guess we've done
our share."

She is not a dull woman either or hard of heart. It has not got to her
yet--that's all! I cannot be hard on her in my judgment, for it did
not come to me all at once, either.

When I saw the first troops going away, I wondered how their mothers
let them go, and I made up my mind that I would not let my boy go,--I
was so glad he was only seventeen,--for hope was strong in our hearts
that it might be over before he was of military age. It was the
Lusitania that brought me to see the whole truth. Then I saw that we
were waging war on the very Princes of Darkness, and I knew that
morning when I read the papers, I knew that it would be better--a
thousand times better--to be dead than to live under the rule of
p