ey chalk, of green corn, of golden hay, with "the King's peace
over all, dear boys, the King's peace over all," as Kipling said.

The whole country seemed as if the events that had come and gone since
the reign, say, of King John had left no more impression upon it than
the cloud shadows that had rolled and passed, rolled and passed. As it
was in the beginning, so it was in the late June of Nineteen Fourteen.
And so it looked as if it must ever remain.

Yet----Here was an extraordinarily unexpected young man bringing into
the midst of all this sun-lit peace the talk of war! War as it had never
yet been waged; war not only on the land and under the waves, but war
that dropped death from the very clouds themselves!

"I think you're talking silly," said Miss Million severely. "No doubt
there's always a certain amount of warring and fighting going on in
India, where poor dad was. Out-of-the-way places like that, where there
aren't any only black people to fight with, anyhow.... But any other
sort of fighting came to an end with the Bo'r War, where dad was outed.

"And I don't see what it's got to do with you, or why you should think
it so fearfully important to go inventing your bomb-droppers and
what-nots for things what--what aren't going to happen!"

The young American smiled in a distant sort of way.

"So you're one of the people that think war isn't going to happen again?
Well! I guess you aren't lonely. Plenty think as you do," he told his
cousin. "Others think as I do. They calculate that sooner or later it's
bound to come. And that if it comes fortune will favour those that have
prepared for the idea of it. Aren't you a soldier's daughter, Cousin
Nellie?"

The little dark head of Sergeant Million's orphan went up proudly.

"Rather!"

"Well, then, you'll take a real live interest," said her cousin, "in
something that might make all the difference in the world to your
country, supposing she did come to grips with another country. That's
the difference that would be made by machines like mine. Not that there
is another machine just like my own, I guess. Let me tell you about
her----"

Again he went on talking about his new bomb-dropper in words that I
don't pretend to understand.

I understood the tone, though.

That was unmistakable. It was the rapt and utterly serious tone which a
person speaks in of something that fills his whole heart. I suppose a
painter would speak thus of his beloved art, or a vi