arm hearts beating behind
those trousers.

Old trousers, I say. Where on earth did they all come from in such a
sudden fashion last spring? Everybody had them. Who would suspect that
a man drawing a salary of ten thousand a year was keeping in reserve a
pair of pepper-and-salt breeches, four sizes too large for him, just
in case a war should break out against Germany! Talk of German
mobilization! I doubt whether the organizing power was all on their side
after all. At any rate it is estimated that fifty thousand pairs of old
trousers were mobilized in Montreal in one week.

But perhaps it was not a case of mobilization, or deliberate
preparedness. It was rather an illustration of the primitive instinct
that is in all of us and that will out in "war time." Any man worth the
name would wear old breeches all the time if the world would let him.
Any man will wind a polka dot tie round his waist in preference to
wearing patent braces. The makers of the ties know this. That is
why they make the tie four feet long. And in the same way if any
manufacturer of hats will put on the market an old fedora, with a limp
rim and a mark where the ribbon used to be but is not--a hat guaranteed
to be six years old, well weathered, well rained on, and certified
to have been walked over by a herd of cattle--that man will make and
deserve a fortune.

These at least were the fashions of last May. Alas, where are they now?
The men that wore them have relapsed again into tailor-made tweeds. They
have put on hard new hats. They are shining their boots again. They are
shaving again, not merely on Saturday night, but every day. They are
sinking back into civilization.

Yet those were bright times and I cannot forbear to linger on them.
Nor the least pleasant feature was our rediscovery of the morning. My
neighbour on the right was always up at five. My neighbour on the
left was out and about by four. With the earliest light of day, little
columns of smoke rose along our street from the kitchen ranges where
our wives were making coffee for us before the servants got up. By six
o'clock the street was alive and busy with friendly salutations. The
milkman seemed a late comer, a poor, sluggish fellow who failed to
appreciate the early hours of the day. A man, we found, might live
through quite a little Iliad of adventure before going to his nine
o'clock office.

"How will you possibly get time to put in a garden?" I asked of one of
my neighbours