s of heaven that the angel at the gate of release for
the child-soul of Corporal Duplessis, the poilu, was only Robina's doll!

DUNDONALD'S DESTROYER

This is the year 1977. It will be objected that the episode I am going
to tell, having happened in 1917, having been witnessed by twenty-odd
thousand people, must have been, if true, for sixty years common
property and an old tale. But when General Cochrane--who saved England
at the end of the great war--told me the Kitchener incident of the story
last year, sitting in the rose-garden of the White Hart Inn at
Sonning-on-Thames, I had never heard of it.

I wonder why he told me. Probably, as is the case in most things which
most people do, from a mixture of impulses. For one thing I am an
American girl, with a fresher zest to hear tales of those titanic days
than the people or the children of the people who lived through them.
Also the great war of 1914 has stirred me since I was old enough to know
about it, and I have read everything concerning it which I could lay
hands on, and talked to everyone who had knowledge of it. Also, General
Cochrane and I made friends from the first minute. I was a quite
unimportant person of twenty-four years, he a magnificent hero of
eighty, one of the proud figures of England; it made me a bit dizzy when
I saw that he liked me. One feels, once in a long time, an unmistakable
double pull, and knows that oneself and another are friends, and not
age, color, race nor previous condition of servitude makes the slightest
difference. To have that happen with a celebrity, a celebrity whom it
would have been honor enough simply to meet, is quite dizzying. This was
the way of it.

I was staying with my cousin Mildred Ward, an Atlanta girl who married
Sir Cecil Ward, an English baronet of Oxfordshire. I reached
Martin-Goring on a day in July just in time to dress for dinner. When I
came down, a bit early, Milly looked me over and pronounced favorably.

"You're not so hard to look at," she pronounced. "It takes an American
really to wear French clothes. I'm glad you're looking well tonight,
because one of your heroes--Oh!"

She had floated inconsequently against a bookcase in a voyage along the
big room, and a spray of wild roses from a vase on the shelf caught in
her pretty gold hair.

"Oh--why does Middleton stick those catchy things up there?" she
complained, separating the flowers from her hair, and I followed her
eyes above the shel