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In the middle of it, there was a quick step on the gravel path outside, for one can enter the office directly from the garden. My back was to the door, and I did not dare turn. I saw Sir Loyden look up, his face ashy; then he reddened strangely, and stood up to face the thing. A tall figure in khaki, his soft service-cap jauntily in place, passed me, and clicking to attention before Sir Loyden, saluted.

"I'm not afraid to leave England or to die for her, if necessary!" said Mr. Reggie in a high, tense voice. "May I have the key, sir?"

Sir Loyden just pointed to it. Mr. Reggie picked it up, faced his father for a silent moment, saluted once more, and went out. For a moment the stiff military figure of his father broke. He reached out an arm as if to stop the boy and tell in words the high pride that was in his face. But Mr. Reggie had already gone out into the sweet-scented summer air.

"Where was I, Slade? . . . Yes, yes ... 'I will make inquiries and advise you further' . . . damn these letters, Slade!" He took off his glasses, put them on again, leaned forward to snap at me: "I suppose you disapprove of the lad, huh? Thought he'd turn out a pussyfooted sentimentalist of the ultramodern breed, didn't you? Lord knows where the world and civilization and the white race and the Empire would be, if there weren't some of us to balance things! . . . Forgot he was a Jaruss, didn't you? Thought he'd buckle in the test, didn't you? Well, maybe I did too. But he didn't, Slade, he didn't! . . . Thought I was harsh with him,

didn't you? My dear Slade," he laughed now, "I didn't really believe that stuff-called him traitor and coward just to put him on his mettle. See that picture up there; that was the boy's great-great-great-grandfather, well, I don't know just how many generations back . . . time of the Roundheads. Got some scruples about his conscience and the king, and it seemed a toss-up if he'd play the traitor or not; but in the end, like all the Jarusses, he stood loyal in the test, Slade. Odd how history repeats itself!"

Seldom have I seen Sir Loyden in such a communicative mood. And looking back now, I think it was compounded of other elements than a natural pride in the boy. His last words came up before me in confirmation . . . no, not quite the last . . . for he said:

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"Slade, a soldier has to do repugnant things sometimes!" . . . and then: "Listen, Slade! What's got into the rooks?"

"They scolded like that, sir, when you came from the woods yesterday."

"Didn't notice," he said; then, suddenly, we both found ourselves tense, listening. Never was such excitement in the rook colony before! We were in the door now-Sir Loyden beside me-both staring across the sunlit meadows to the woods at the back of the estate. Often since, in sweating nightmares, I have dreamt of the rooks as I saw them then-a black cloud rising above the trees, an angry cloud, hesitating, then sweeping under some sudden leadership toward us, a strange, halting flight, battalions of them, more than one would think the woods could hold.

"Good God!" cried Sir Loyden, last before his father, Sir Loyden, gripping my arm. saluting.

The black battalions were faltering in their flight. Somewhere we could hear the shrieks of women—the domestics, and perhaps Miss Miriam. The birds were almost overhead now; right and left they began dropping, in meadow and shrubbery and garden, and one black lifeless creature at our feet on the garden path. Out of the woods they still came in their eery flight, and now death was among them savagely, and their cawings, save for a few escaping birds, were stifled in a croaking and finally a ghastly silence.

Out of the woods came a figure, barely distinguishable at first in his khaki, a figure not less eery in his way than the flight of birds above him, for at times he walked, and at times he seemed to run jerkily forward, as if, at any cost, the distance must be covered. If we thought at all to run to him, our feet were paralyzed. We stood there, dumbly there, dumbly watching, until he came upon us, a staggering figure now, reeling forward, stiffening straight as a rod at

"It's all destroyed, sir!" he said. "All destroyed!" His hands worked convulsively about his head and face. "If-if you make more of it

. remember, sir . . . just what the thing-looks like!" He choked horribly, put a hand to his throat, controlled himself, and gave all his effort in a struggle to tear off his Sam Browne and his tunic. "A traitor, sir!" He reeled. "A traitor-to you-and gas-and war-but not to England! . . . England!"

An agony seized him again. He fell to the ground, writhing, clutching at his throat. We were impotent. It is not of his convulsive anguish as I saw it then, that I shall always think and dream. It is his face! I cannot describe it, as at last he turned and lay stark and still, with the English sunlight full upon him.

I only know that his father, Sir Loyden, with an inarticulate cry, tore off his tunic with the red tabs of authority upon it, threw it over the face of his dead son, and fled.

YOUNG LOOK

FLORENCE S. SMALL

There is a look all young things have-
A kid, a calf, a colt, a child,

This tight closed bud upon the bough

A look that is both soft and wild

And frail and sweet and all askance,
Atilt for flight, a dewy stare

That questions life; untarnished, they
Pass judgment, shyly unaware.

S

CROWD WANDERLUST

Let's Go See, Is the Post-War Cry

WALTER S. HIATT

INCE we crawled out of the ooze on to dry land, since that first jungle baby crept on all fours to see what lay in the next dell, the wander instinct has been strong in us. It has perhaps been the dream of every person ever born to travel to some distant place; in this century, to go around the world.

There is something very fresh, almost primitive, about our present travel psychology. It smacks of a fabled first sport, of the day when drama was born. Our eyes are full of seeking, draw our bodies in headlong plunges up and down the world. We count our crowds by the million because people won't stay still. Our South and our West are full of young people who see the country by working their way from job to job. I met one of these lately, a tramp librarian. "I adore travel," she volunteered, as she handed out some references on the amazing growth of the tourist industry. "Why?"

"Oh, it's such fun," she said with glowing eyes; "seeing life, different countries and things. My home is My home is in the Northwest, but I've traveled a lot already, seen California, the Middle West, New York." Then a shadow crossed her face. "I haven't seen Europe or the East-yet."

In this prim bespectacled librarian spoke the age-old call of the wild, the voice of romance, the yearning for the new and the strange, the will and the daring to take the open road across wide rivers on to new frontiers, to answer freedom's challenge.

When the travel itch caught people, they used to have to invent sound reasons for wishing to follow the path that lured them. Not so long ago, in quieter days, travel for pleasure was often considered the sport of spendthrifts, of very bad runaway boys, something shady, one of the vices of the loafer, at best the recreation of harmless if not respectable old people, preferably men. Boys of the Middle West who wondered how it would look to see the ocean roll-if it really did roll-were solemnly warned that it was a most dangerous place. And as for ships, it had been known since Bible days that they invariably sank with all hands.

To-day people are ashamed to stay at home, and as for ships they can't be kept off them. Lately I was on the dock of a vessel sailing for Spain. One of the passengers was a Middle West teacher on her first trip abroad. As the steamer pulled out of the slip, her face radiated joy. She threw kisses helter-skelter at friends

on the dock. Every twist in her quivering body said, "At last, at last, I'm going!" One of those women friends on the dock exclaimed, tragedy in her eyes: "I feel like an exile, positively! I have to stay at home."

Last year a steamship man organized a world university cruise for men students. He had more than a thousand applications from young women who didn't know it was a cruise for men only.

Inland people respond readily to the newer plans of travel that make it cheap. A few years ago a Missouri physician, out of health and funds, felt he should go abroad for a rest. He had heard of the group travel plan. So he organized a tour for physicians and nurses, found a sufficient number, and came home restored to health, with money in his pocket.

On a recent trip the Leviathan carried thirty-two hundred passengers, nine hundred of whom were students of all ages. By tapping the desire of America to travel, and placing comforts at the disposal of travelers at a minimum rate, the Atlantic steamship trade has avoided some of the losses resulting from the United States immigration exclusion law.

Travel has become a top-liner, the chief of all outdoor sports. Go! That's the new crowd psychology of all the peoples of the earth. Go! It's grand fun. And everybody's doing it, especially the women. That poor old World War started it, of course. Like a Rip Van Winkle, every once in a while we rub our eyes and see some new change wrought by that war. The war buried many; but it has resurrected more. That

churning of souls brought out the wild sap of youth, revived the instinct of freedom, restored the roaming lust of the caveman, akin to that of the animals of the jungle, the birds of the air, the troop of horses jumping pasture fences.

We have lost the rocking-chair point of view of living; we have a newer, or perhaps an older, concept of leisure. The pre-war traveler who, loaded down with baggage and guide-books, took his travel seriously, to improve his mind, is all but gone. Certainly he is now submerged in the crowds of joy travelers, always on the go, new editions of the Flying Dutchman.

Proof or evidence of this new travel mind has lately been provided by the failures of two world expositions, one in London, one in Philadelphia. After the London failure, the matter was heatedly debated in Parliament, charges of mismanagement and corruption made, finally the losses settled with much grumbling. To the Philadelphia exposition last year came five, not fifty, million people as expected. There followed the same charges, the same grumbling, as after the London exposition.

Why would not people travel long distances, as they had in pre-war days to other expositions? The answer is, in the slang of the day, that expositions are "out." People have traveled so much that they have seen most of the things expositions provide, or else they wish to see their sights at the point of origin, not in glass cases or as side-shows. Above all, when they travel, it is frankly to enjoy themselves. They are more sophisticated. They know

a good deal, and they know what think, these are with the snows of they want.

Coney Island, the most widely advertised freak pleasure-resort in the Western Hemisphere, has for several seasons complained about the unfavorable weather that keeps away the great spender crowds. It is not the weather at all. People go farther, to other beaches where there are more crowds or fewer crowds, where the atmosphere is different. Resort managers about London and Paris have the same tales to tell. Staid London has always been a dead city on Sunday; and now Paris, and for another reason, is dead on Sunday. People begin on Saturday to leave for the country; they range for hundreds of miles over France, instead of going for a brief afternoon walk on the grands boulevards or to the Bois, or taking a ride on the Seine boats. On holidays, Sundays, in vacation time, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, empty themselves in the

same way.

So there is a new world picture, and it was not there in 1914. Nor does anybody want to go alone any more. The crowd is milling here at home, afoot, hiking, hopping into automobiles, riding horses, aëroplaning, motor-boating, swimming, racing hither and yon by railroad, by electric car, by motor-bus, fleeing east, south, southwest, to Canada and from Canada, to the West Indies, to Europe, around the world, in season and out-there are no more seasons for travel-going!

22

Fear of strange places has gone out of the world. That mid-Victorian fixity, primness, stay-at-homeness, inhibitions of what the neighbors

yester-year. I sometimes fancy I saw the death of Fear. It was on Monte Nero, the last mountain held by the Italians against the Austrians seeking to break forth upon the plains toward Venice and Padua. A motor-truck carrying shells to Italian guns was swinging up a road built along the mountain. The road was being shelled by the Austrian guns. On the seat of the truck was a baby, out for a ride, and at each shell explosion he clapped his hands in glee. A grand ride!

That baby is the new generation, symbol of other crowds roving the wide world. Those other crowds are not so prosperous as the American crowd, not so well fed and clothed, not provided with so many aids to travel, but they go. I've seen Russia topsyturvy with such crowds, piling on trains already overcrowded, pushing into coaches that were jammed, then climbing for more room on the car roofs. I've seen the same spectacle in Rumania, other crowds in Turkey, Persia, going afoot, on horseback, in wagons, carts, going.

And it was these people, particularly the Orientals, who before the war regarded the American or European traveler as some sort of a lunatic. To them the objects and pleasures of travel were unintelligible. That European and Asiatic peasant used to be a stay-at-home body who rarely left his fields. Recently I saw some hundreds of peasants rushing a train in Central Europe.

"Where are they going?" I asked the distracted conductor.

"I don't know, and they don't either," he replied sourly.

When the war was ending I was

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