.

The next chapter opened ten years later with a letter saying that
Margaret Donaldson's boy was left with her poor and elderly parents and
that they did not want him. Would I, his mother being dead, take care
of him? He was twelve, healthy and intelligent--which led directly to
the evening when I sat, very cross, at my desk and fished young John's
note out of the scrap-basket. I had got as far in answer as "Dear
John"--when these visions of the past interrupted. I am not soft-hearted.
I am crabbed and prejudiced and critical, and I dislike irregularity.
Above all I am thoroughly selfish. But the sum of that is short of
being brutal. Only sheer brutality could repel the lad's note and
request. My answer went as follows:

"Dear John: I will come to your commencement and bring you back
with me for a short time. I may take you on a fishing trip to
Canada. Sincerely, Uncle Bill."

The youngster as he came into the school drawing-room was a thing to
remember. He was a tall boy, and he looked like his father. Very olive
he was--and is--and his blue eyes shone out of the dark face from under
the same thickset and long lashes. His father's charm and beauty halted
me, but I judged, before I let myself go, that he had also his mother's
stability. I have seen no reason since to doubt my judgment. I never
had so fine a fishing trip to Canada as that summer, in spite of the
fact that John broke four good rods. He has been my most successful
investment; and when the war broke out and he rushed to me clamoring to
go, I felt indeed that I was giving humanity my best and my own. Then
one day he came, in his uniform of an ambulance driver, to tell me
good-bye.

That was in 1914, and the boy, just about to enter Yale, was eighteen.
He went through bad fighting, and in March, 1917, he was given a Croix
de Guerre.[52-1] Then America came in and he transferred to his own
flag and continued ambulance work under our Red Cross. He drove one
of the twenty ambulances hurried into Italy after the Caporetto
disaster[52-2] in October, the first grip of the hand of America to
that brave hand of Italy.

I did not know for a time that my lad was in the ambulance section
rushed to Italy, but I had a particular interest from the first in this
drive for I had spent weeks, twice, up in Lombardy and Venetia.[52-3]
That was how I followed the Italian disaster--as a terrible blow to a
number of old friends. Then after the Caporetto crisis c