much per look, and presented the proceeds to the Red Cross.

The war came home to the finest of our people first. It has not
reached them all yet, but it is working in, like the frost into the
cellars when the thermometer shows forty degrees below zero. Many a
cellar can stand a week of this--but look out for the second! Every
day it comes to some one.

"I don't see why we are always asked to give," one woman said
gloomily, when the collector asked her for a monthly subscription to
the Red Cross. "Every letter that goes out of the house has a stamp on
it--and we write a queer old lot of letters, and I guess we've done
our share."

She is not a dull woman either or hard of heart. It has not got to her
yet--that's all! I cannot be hard on her in my judgment, for it did
not come to me all at once, either.

When I saw the first troops going away, I wondered how their mothers
let them go, and I made up my mind that I would not let my boy go,--I
was so glad he was only seventeen,--for hope was strong in our hearts
that it might be over before he was of military age. It was the
Lusitania that brought me to see the whole truth. Then I saw that we
were waging war on the very Princes of Darkness, and I knew that
morning when I read the papers, I knew that it would be better--a
thousand times better--to be dead than to live under the rule of
people whose hearts are so utterly black and whose process of
reasoning is so oxlike--they are so stupidly brutal. I knew then that
no man could die better than in defending civilization from this
ghastly thing which threatened her!