he was silent a moment and then
spoke softly a single word. "America!" said Eleanor reverently.

America! Her sound has gone out into all lands and her words into the
end of the world. America, who in a year took four million of sons
untried, untrained, and made them into a mighty army; who adjusted a
nation of a hundred million souls in a turn of the hand to unknown and
unheard of conditions. America, whose greatest glory yet is not these
things. America, of whom scholars and statesmen and generals and
multi-millionaires say with throbbing pride today: "This is my country,"
but of whom the least in the land, having brought what they may, however
small, to lay on that flaming altar of the world's safety--of whom the
least in the land may say as truly as the greatest, "This is my country,
too."

THE SWALLOW

The Chateau Frontenac at Quebec is a turreted pile of masonry wandering
down a cliff over the very cellars of the ancient Castle of St. Louis. A
twentieth-century hotel, it simulates well a mediaeval fortress and lifts
against the cold blue northern sky an atmosphere of history. Old voices
whisper about its towers and above the clanging hoofs in its paved
court; deathless names are in the wind which blows from the "fleuve,"
the great St. Lawrence River far below. Jacques Cartier's voice was
heard hereabouts away back in 1539, and after him others, Champlain and
Frontenac, and Father Jogues and Mother Marie of the Conception and
Montcalm--upstanding fighting men and heroic women and hardy discoverers
of New France walked about here once, on the "Rock" of Quebec; there is
romance here if anywhere on earth. Today a new knighthood hails that
past. Uniforms are thick in steep streets; men are wearing them with
empty sleeves, on crutches, or maybe whole of body yet with racked faces
which register a hell lived through. Canada guards heroism of many
vintages, from four hundred years back through the years to Wolfe's
time, and now a new harvest. Centuries from now children will be told,
with the story of Cartier, the tale of Vimy Ridge, and while the Rock
stands the records of Frenchmen in Canada, of Canadians in France will
not die.

Always when I go to the Chateau I get a table, if I can, in the smaller
dining-room. There the illusion of antiquity holds through modern
luxury; there they have hung about the walls portraits of the worthies
of old Quebec; there Samuel Champlain himself, made into bronze and
heroi