“You were doing a great work and a good work, Harry,” they said.  “The boy would want you to carry on.  Do not drop all the good you were doing.”

I knew that they were right.  To sit alone and give way to my grief was a selfish thing to do at such a time.  If there was work for me to do, still, it was my duty to try to do it, no matter how greatly I would have preferred to rest quiet.  At this time there was great need of making the people of Britain understand the need of food conservation, and so I began to go about London, making speeches on that subject wherever people could be gathered together to listen to me.  They told me I did some good.  And at least, I tried.

And before long I was glad, indeed, that I had listened to the counsel of my friends and had not given way to my selfish desire to nurse my grief in solitude and silence.  For I realized that there was a real work for me to do.  Those folk who had begged me to do my part in lightening the gloom of Britain had been right.  There was so much sorrow and grief in the land that it was the duty of all who could dispel it, if even for a little space, to do what they could.  I remembered that poem of Ella Wheeler Wilcox—­“Laugh and the World Laughs With You!” And so I tried to laugh, and to make the part of the world that I chanced to be in laugh with me.  For I knew there was weeping and sorrowing enough.

And all the time I felt that the spirit of my boy was with me, and that he knew what I was doing, and why, and was glad, and that he understood that if I laughed it was not because I thought less often of him, or missed him less keenly and bitterly than I had done from the very beginning.

There was much praise for my work from high officials, and it made me proud and glad to know that the men who were at the head of Britain’s effort in the war thought I was being of use.  One time I spoke with Mr. Balfour, the former Prime Minister, at Drury Lane Theatre to one of the greatest war gatherings that was ever held in London.

And always and everywhere there were the hospitals, full of the laddies who had been brought home from France.  Ah, but they were pitiful, those laddies who had fought, and won, and been brought back to be nursed back to the life they had been so bravely willing to lay down for their country!  But it was hard to look at them, and know how they were suffering, and to go through with the task I had set myself of cheering them and comforting them in my own way!  There were times when it was all I could do to get through with my program.

They never complained.  They were always bright and cheerful, no matter how terrible their wounds might be; no matter what sacrifices they had made of eyes and limbs.  There were men in those hospitals who knew that they were going out no more than half the men they had been.  And yet they were as brave and careless of themselves as if their wounds had been but trifles.  I think the greatest exhibition of courage and nerve the world has ever seen was to be found in those hospitals in London and, indeed, all over Britain, where those wonderful lads kept up their spirits always, though they knew they could never again be sound in body.