books and pictures destroyed, and only those worthless bits of china
and plated ware to "start housekeeping again," it would have been
humorous. Real humor is only exaggeration. That would surely have
been a colossal exaggeration.

It is not the first time I have had to ask myself, seriously, "Why this
mania for possession?" The ferryman on the Styx is as likely to take it
across as our railroad is to "handle" it today. Yet nothing seems able
to break a person born with that mania for collecting.

I stood looking round at it all when everything was in place, and I
realized that if the disaster had come, I should have found it easy to
reconcile myself to it in an epoch where millions were facing it with
me. It is the law of Nature. Material things, like the friends we have
lost, may be eternally regretted. They cannot be eternally grieved for.
We must "--be up and doing, With a heart for any fate."

All the same, it was a queer twist in the order of my life, that, hunting
in all directions for a quiet retreat in which to rest my weary spirit, I
should have ended by deliberately sitting myself down on the edge of
a battlefield,--even though it was on the safe edge,--and stranger still,
that there I forgot that my spirit was weary.

We are beginning to pick up all sorts of odd little tales of the
adventures of some of the people who had remained at Voisin. One
old man there, a mason, who had worked on my house, had a very
queer experience. Like all the rest of them, he went on working in the
fields all through the menacing days. I can't make out whether he had
no realization of actual danger, or whether that was his way of
meeting it. Anyway, he disappeared on the morning the battle began,