ent back to them
limbless and mad, to be rocked in cradles--for many years, perhaps.

Still the younger women, softer creatures of impulse, had borne a child
or two. One of these, born the second year of the war, was a very blonde
and bullet-headed rascal of three, with a bullying air, and of a roving
disposition. But such traits appear engaging in children of sufficiently
tender years, and he was a sort of village plaything, here, there, and
everywhere, on the most familiar terms with the wrecks of the war which
the Government of that country had made.

He tried on the tin mask and played with the baker's mechanical leg, so
indulgent were they of his caprices; and it amused him excessively to
rock the cradle of the man who had no limbs, and who was his father.

In and out he ran, and was humored to his bent. To one he seemed the son
he had lost, to another the son he might have had, had the world gone
differently. To others he served as a brief escape from the shadow of a
future without hope; to others yet, the diversion of an hour. This last
was especially true of the blind man who sat at the door of his old
mother's cottage binding brooms. The presence of the child seemed to him
like a warm ray of sunshine falling across his hand, and he would lure
him to linger by letting him try on the great blue goggles which he
found it best to wear in public. But no disfigurement or deformity
appeared to frighten the little fellow. These had been his playthings
from earliest infancy.

One morning, his mother, being busy washing clothes, had left him alone,
confident that he would soon seek out some friendly fragment of soldier,
and entertain himself till noon and hunger-time. But occasionally
children have odd notions, and do the exact opposite of what one
supposes.

On this brilliant summer morning the child fancied a solitary ramble
along the bank of the mountain-stream. Vaguely he meant to seek a pool
higher up, and to cast stones in it. He wandered slowly straying now and
then into small valleys, or chasing wayside ducks. It was past ten
before he gained the green-gleaming and foam-whitened pool, sunk in the
shadow of a tall gray rock over whose flat top three pine-trees swayed
in the fresh breeze. Under them, looking to the child like a white cloud
in a green sky, stood a beautiful young man, poised on the sheer brink
for a dive. A single instant he stood there, clad only in shadow and
sunshine, the next he had dived s