* * * * *

Then I gathered up his schoolbooks, and every dog-eared exercise-book,
and his timetable, which I found pinned on his window curtain, and I
carried them up to the storeroom in the attic, with his baseball
mitt--and then, for the first time, as I made a pile of the books
under the beams, I broke my anti-tear pledge. It was not for myself,
or for my neighbor across the street whose only son had gone, or for
the other mothers who were doing the same things all over the world;
it was not for the young soldiers who had gone out that day; it was
for the boys who had been cheated of their boyhood, and who had to
assume men's burdens, although in years they were but children. The
saddest places of all the world to-day are not the battle fields, or
the hospitals, or the cross-marked hillsides where the brave ones are
buried; the saddest places are the deserted campus and playgrounds
where they should be playing; the empty seats in colleges, where they
should be sitting; the spaces in the ranks of happy, boisterous
schoolboys, from which the brave boys have gone,--these boys whose
boyhood has been cut so pitifully short. I thought, too, of the little
girls whose laughter will ring out no more in the careless, happy
abandonment of girlhood, for the black shadow of anxiety and dread has
fallen even on their young hearts; the tiny children, who, young as
they are, know that some great sorrow has come to every one; the
children of the war countries, with their terror-stricken eyes and
pale faces; the unspeakable, unforgivable wrong that has been done to
youth the world over.

* * * * *

There, as I sat on the floor of the storeroom, my soul wandered down a