mble in the top to contain ink. Hannibal found himself looking at
this, and noting the perfect miniature reproduction of the big calendar
on the wall, as it was refracted by the glass. With his thoughts far
away, his eyes continued to look at the neat little curly calendar in
the ink-well. Presently it seemed to him that it was not a calendar at
all, but just a patch of bright green color--a patch of bright green
that became grass, an acre of it, a ten-acre field, a great field gay
with trampled flowers, rolling hills, woods, meadows, fences, streams.
Then he saw, lying thickly over a fair region, broken guns, exploded
cannons, torn flags, horses and men contorted and sprung in death;
everywhere death and demolition. He wandered over the field and came
presently upon himself, scorched, mangled, and dead under the wheel of a
cannon.

After a little it seemed to him that the field of battle shrank until
it became again the calendar. But there was something odd about that
calendar; the dates were queer. It read July, right enough; but this
was the year 1861, whereas the calendar bore the date 1863. And why was
there a cross to mark the third day of July? Hannibal came to with a
shock; but he could have sworn that he had not been asleep.

"God is very--very good!" he said solemnly.

Then he opened his pen-knife, and scratched a deep line of erasure
through the "Carpe diem" in his locket, and underneath, cutting with
great pains, he inserted a date, "July 3, 1863," and the words "Nunc
dimittis." Below that he cut "Te Deum laudamus."

He looked once more at the picture of his mother and at the picture that
was not of his mother, shut the little gold case, and put it back in his
pocket.

Then he inked on the white inside of a paper-box cover, in large
letters, these words:

This office will not be opened until the end of the war.

That office was never opened again.

XXI

The lives of sixty million people had become suddenly full of drill,
organization, uniforms, military music, flags, hatred, love, and
self-sacrifice, and the nations of the Old World stood about, note-book
in hand, like so many medical students at a clinic: could a heart, cut
in two, continue to supply a body with blood after the soul had been
withdrawn? And the nations of the Old World hoped that there would be
enough fresh meat left on the carcass for them to feed on, when the
experiment should be at an end. Mother England was particularl