, but that I,
too, looked upon the battle from a place where there were no flames. I
ran little errands for the war.

* * * * *

There is the familiar window--that dull outline across the room. Here
is the accustomed door. The bed is set between. It was but a dream
after all. And yet how it has shaken me!

Of course the dream was absurd. No man--no nation certainly--could be
so mad. The whole whirling earth could not burn with fire. Until the
final trumpet, no such calamity is possible. Thank God, it was but a
dream, and I can continue today my peaceful occupation.

Calico, I'm told, is going up. I must protect our contracts.

On Going Afoot.

There is a tale that somewhere in the world there is a merry river
that dances as often as it hears sweet music. The tale is not precise
whether this river is neighbor to us or is a stream of the older
world. "It dances at the noise of musick," so runs the legend, "for
with musick it bubbles, dances and grows sandy." This tale may be the
conceit of one of those older poets whose verses celebrate the morning
and the freshness of the earth--Thomas Heywood could have written it
or even the least of those poets who sat their evenings at the
Mermaid--or the tale may arise more remotely from an old worship of
the god Pan, who is said to have piped along the streams. I offer my
credence to the earlier origin as the more pleasing. And therefore on
a country walk I observe the streams if by chance any of them shall
fit the tale. Not yet have I seen Pan puffing his cheeks with melody
on a streamside bank--by ill luck I squint short-sightedly--but I
often hear melodies of such woodsy composition that surely they must
issue from his pipe. The stream leaps gaily across the shallows that
glitter with sunlight, and I am tempted to the agreeable suspicion
that I have hit upon the very stream of the legend and that the god
Pan sits hard by in the thicket and beats his shaggy hoof in rhythm.
It is his song that the wind sings in the trees. If a bird sings in
the meadow its tune is pitched to Pan's reedy obligato.

Whether or not this is true, I confess to a love of a stream. This may
be merely an anaemic love of beauty, such as is commonly bred in
townsfolk on a holiday, or it may descend from braver ancestors who
once were anglers and played truant with hook and line. You may recall
that the milk-women of Kent told Piscator when he came at the end of