He rose from the table, quickly.

"I'm off!" he said.

"Where?" I asked him.

"To the ticket office to see about changing my berth. There's a
steamer this week--maybe I can still find room aboard her."

He was not long gone. He and his chum went down together and come
back smiling triumphantly.

"It's all right, Dad," he told me. "I go to Adelaide by train and get
the steamer there. I'll have time to see you and mother off--your
steamer goes two hours before my train."

We were going to New Zealand. And my boy was was going home to fight
for his country. They would call me too old, I knew--I was forty-four
the day Britain declared war.

What a turmoil there was about us! So fast were things moving that
there seemed no time for thought, John's mother and I could not
realize the full meaning of all that was happening. But we knew that
John was snatched away from us just after he had come, and it was
hard--it was cruelly hard.

But such thoughts were drowned in the great surging excitement that
was all about us. In Melbourne, and I believe it must have been much
the same elsewhere in Australia, folks didn't know what they were to
do, how they were to take this war that had come so suddenly upon