hing to help that boy; help him get away from the
doctor who was writing a book about him, and the girl who wanted
him to make the most of himself; get away and be lost altogether
in what he had been lucky enough to find. All day, as Claude came
and went, he looked among the crowds for that young face, so
compassionate and tender.

IV

Deeper and deeper into flowery France! That was the sentence
Claude kept saying over to himself to the jolt of the wheels, as
the long troop train went southward, on the second day after he
and his company had left the port of debarkation. Fields of
wheat, fields of oats, fields of rye; all the low hills and
rolling uplands clad with harvest. And everywhere, in the grass,
in the yellowing grain, along the road-bed, the poppies spilling
and streaming. On the second day the boys were still calling to
each other about the poppies; nothing else had so entirely
surpassed their expectations. They had supposed that poppies grew
only on battle fields, or in the brains of war correspondents.
Nobody knew what the cornflowers were, except Willy Katz, an
Austrian boy from the Omaha packing-houses, and he knew only an
objectionable name for them, so he offered no information. For a
long time they thought the red clover blossoms were wild
flowers,--they were as big as wild roses. When they passed the
first alfalfa field, the whole train rang with laughter; alfalfa
was one thing, they believed, that had never been heard of
outside their own prairie states.

All the way down, Company B had been finding the old things
instead of the new,--or, to their way of thinking, the new things
instead of the old. The thatched roofs they had so counted upon
seeing were few and far between. But American binders, of
well-known makes, stood where the fields were beginning to
ripen,--and they were being oiled and put in order, not by
"peasants," but by wise-looking old farmers who seemed to know
their business. Pear trees, trained like vines against the wall,
did not astonish them half so much as the sight of the familiar
cottonwood, growing everywhere. Claude thought he had never
before realized how beautiful this tree could be. In verdant
little valleys, along the clear rivers, the cottonwoods waved and
rustled; and on the little islands, of which there were so many
in these rivers, they stood in pointed masses, seemed to grip
deep into the soil and to rest easy, as if they had been there
for ever and would