For it was a very splendid old boy who was cooking for me and greasing my boots and going off with me after moose; putting his keen ancestral instincts of three thousand years at my service for three dollars a day. With my chances would not Rafael have been a bigger man than I? At least never could I achieve that grand air, that austere repose of manner which he had got with no trouble at all from a line of unwashed but courageous old bucks, thinking highly of themselves for untold generations, and killing everything which thought otherwise. I laughed all but aloud at this spot in my meditations, as a special vision of Rafael rose suddenly, when he had stated, on a day, his views of the great war. He talked plain language about the Germans. He specified why he considered the nation a disgrace to humanity--most people, not German, agree on the thesis and its specifications. Then the fire of his ancient fighting blood blazed through restraint of manner. He drew up his tall figure, slim-waisted, deep-shouldered, every inch sliding muscle. "I am too old to go on first call to army," said Rafael. "Zey will not take me. Yes, and on second call. Maybe zird time. But if time come when army take me--I go. If I may kill four Germans I will be content," stated Rafael concisely. And his warrior forebears would have been proud of him as he stated it. My reflections were disturbed here by the American general at the next table. He was spoken to by his waiter and shot up and left the room, carrying, however, his napkin in his hand, so that I knew he was due to come back. A half sentence suggested a telephone. I watched the soldierly back with plenty of patriotic pride; this was the sort of warrior my country turned out now by tens of thousands. With that he returned, and as I looked up into his face, behold it was Fitzhugh. My chair went banging as I sprang toward him. "Jim!" And the general's calm dignity suddenly was the radiant grin of the boy who had played and gone to school and stolen apples with me for a long bright childhood--the boy lost sight of these last years of his in the army. "Dave!" he cried out. "Old Davy Cram!" And his arm went around my shoulder regardless of the public. "My word, but I'm glad!" he sputtered. And then: "Come and have dinner--finish having it. Come to our table." He slewed me about and presented me to the three others. In a minute I was installed, to the pride of my friend the head waiter, at military headquarters, next to Fitzhugh and the Frenchman. A campact resume of personal history between Fitzhugh and myself over, I turned to the blue figure on my left hand, Colonel Raffre, of the French, army. On his broad chest hung thrilling bits of color, not only the bronze war cross, with its green watered ribbon striped with red, but the blood-red ribbon of the "Great Cross" itself--the cross of the Legion of Honor. I spoke to him in French, which happens to be my second mother tongue, and he met the sound with a beaming welcome. "I don't do English as one should," he explained in beautiful Parisian. "No gift of tongues in my kit, I fear; also I'm a bit embarrassed at