Boy of My Heart. Marie Connor Leighton

boy of just six years old one must go forward with things and play the game, he steadied and straightened himself suddenly, lifted his big head very high—it was like the head of a lion cub—and, though his cheeks were bloodless still, went through the ceremony without faltering.

      "He's got the stuff in him that heroes are made of," someone said to his father and to me. "He'd go to martyrdom just in the same way."

      The other scene that stands out took place half a year earlier, when he was five and a half. He had been down on a visit to some relatives in the country and was talking about a particular pond which he had seen. Then his father began to tell him the story of how the famous American preacher Theodore Parker, when he was a little boy, was standing one day by a pond, looking at a beautiful flower that grew at its edge, when a frog suddenly came up out of the water. Young Parker took up a stone to kill the frog, but stopped because a voice within him, which was the voice of his conscience, told him that it would be wrong to take the harmless creature's life.

      "Yes, fa'ver," Little Yeogh Wough nodded wisely. "I know about that voice. I've heard it, too. I'm hearing it now."

      "You're hearing it now, Roland? What do you mean?"

      "Why, down at Uncle Jack's there were some nice round things, all white and red and smooth, and I wanted them and I asked Auntie May if I could have them and she said: 'No, Yoland, you can't have them, because they're ivowy card counters.' And I didn't like her telling me I couldn't have them, so I took them when she was gone out, and I've bwought them up here to London wiv' me. Nurse doesn't know. I've got them now. But I don't feel as if I want them now."

      "No, of course not. That was very wrong of you. You must go and get them at once and give them up to your mother or to me and we will send them back to Auntie May and tell her that you are very sorry."

      "Yes, I've been sorry ever since I bwought them up."

      A little blue silk suit flashed my thoughts back to a garden party which the weather turned into an indoor party, and at which Little Yeogh Wough made himself a small Master of the Ceremonies, taking away from his smaller sister an ice which she had secretly captured and conducting her upstairs on the pretext that at three and a half years old she was too young to take part in social affairs. How the gay, brave little feet went about that day, with the joy of the May-time in the house, in spite of the rain, and outside all the glamour and the glory of a London that as yet knew not the Great War!

      There is an American song in which a mother declares that she never raised her son to be a soldier. I never raised my son to be a soldier. I thought he had too much brain power for the Army, especially if there was to be no war. And yet I was making him a soldier every day, and, above all, every night.

      For every night of his life, from the time he was two years old, I had gone to see him in bed, as he phrased it. Now and again there was a break in these nightly visits, when I had to go out to dinner, and especially to an unusually early dinner; but, except for these rare breaks, I never failed the child in these good-night talks.

      "Come and see me in bed, mother," was his regular appeal after his good-night kiss. And I went, and after hearing him say his prayers I knelt down by his bedside and talked to him, sometimes for a whole hour.

      Not that he and I had long talks at these particular times only. All day long, until his school days came, we were together. I never talked down to him or tried to make myself a child for him. It was he who was always trying to reach up to me. When I brushed my hair or looked over my clothes or dressed for some affair or other, he was in my room always and I talked to him in French, until he came to know in a tender easy way that tongue which has been of so much use to him in this past year of the War, when, as adjutant, and as Mess President of his battalion, he has needed to do a good deal of talking with people who haven't a word of English. He would hear me repeating snatches of poetry, too, and afterwards, when he was alone, he could be heard saying them over to himself in a way which showed that he perfectly grasped their meaning. He walked with me, drove with me, watched me at my work, and, as soon as he was able to read, began to read to me. For I had hurt my eyes by overwork then and could not read to myself. It was my Compensation for having him and for having at the same time a little—a very little—worldly success.

      This belief in Compensation has become a part of my life now and stops my natural gaiety. I have never had a happy day yet or a whole-hearted laugh without paying for it. This is what makes me afraid now that Yeogh Wough is coming home on his second leave. A man who is fighting for his country does not come home unwounded on his second leave without something happening.

      Oh, if people would only see this and take care! But they are blind to instances of it that are about them every day. Lord Roberts bought his Boer War successes with the death of his son. Lieutenant Warneford paid for his double V.C. with his life when he next went up into the air. And so on.

      At night, when I knelt by Yeogh Wough's bedside till my knees were sore, the things we talked of were different. We put Henley and Browning and Stevenson and others of their kind aside then and I spoke to him of what boyhood means and what manhood means; of the glories of manly work, such as engineering, shipbuilding, inventing, and the need for hard striving and straight living.

      "You must never be feeble, Little Yeogh Wough. Feebleness is a thing that nobody can forgive, except in old people and children. It's better to be strong in doing bad things than not strong at all. But you'll get to know when you grow up that badness is only a funny kind of weakness. You must be strong. Look at Kitchener! He's got on by being strong and thorough. They say that when the rails came for the building of the Soudan railway he examined every yard of metal himself, not trusting to other people. That's thoroughness."

      I taught him what patriotism means.

      He had lived through the Boer War, though it had found him hardly more than four years old. He had seen a woman burst into tears in the street when a regiment of Highlanders swung past, and I had told him why she had done so and all about Magersfontein. I had told him the story of the American Civil War, lighting it up with such things as the story of the play "Secret Service." I had put great figures up as models for him, and among them was the figure of Cecil Rhodes. I had taught him that the least little thing he did, even so small a thing as the mending of a toy, must be done thoroughly, because he was British born and had the British repute to keep up. And then together, he with his curly head on the pillow and his hand clasping mine as I knelt beside the bed, we would repeat poems by Newbolt and Conan Doyle and Quiller Couch. The one he came to love best was Newbolt's "Vitæ Lampada" with those lines:—