I could not, much as I should in many ways have liked to do so, prolong my stay in Scotland.  The peace and the restfulness of the Highlands, the charm of the heather and the hills, the long, lazy days with my rod, whipping some favorite stream—­ah, they made me happy for a moment, but they could not make me forget!  My duty called me back, and the thought of war, and suffering, and there were moments when it seemed to me that nothing could keep me from plunging again into the work I had set out to do.

In those days I was far too restless to be taking my ease at home, in my wee hoose at Dunoon.  A thousand activities called me.  The rest had been necessary; I had had to admit that, and to obey my doctor, for I had been feeling the strain of my long continued activity, piled up, as it was, on top of my grief and care.  And yet I was eager to be off and about my work again.

I did not want to go back to the same work I had been doing.  No!  I was still a young man.  I was younger than men and officers who were taking their turn in the trenches.  I was but forty-six years old, and there was a lot of life and snap in the old dog yet!  My life had been rightly lived.  As a young man I had worked in a pit, ye ken, and that had given me a strength in my back and my legs that would have served me well in the trenches.  War, these days, means hard work as well as fighting—­more, indeed.  War is a business, a great industry, now.  There is all manner of work that must be done at the front and right behind it.  Aye, and I was eager to be there and to be doing my share of it—­and not for the first time.

Many a time, and often, I had broached my idea of being allowed to enlist, e’en before the Huns killed my boy.  But they would no listen to me.  They told me, each time, that there was more and better work for me to do at hame in Britain, spurring others on, cheering them when they came back maimed and broken, getting the country to put its shoulder to the wheel when it came to subscribing to the war loans and all the rest of it.  And it seemed to me that it was not for me to decide; that I must obey those who were better in a position to judge than I could be.

I went down south to England, and I talked again of enlisting and trying to get a crack at those who had killed my boy.  And again my friends refused to listen to me.

“Why, Harry,” they said to me—­and not my own friends, only, but men highly placed enough to make me know that I must pay heed to what they said—­“you must not think of it!  If you enlisted, or if we got you a commission, you’d be but one man out there.  Here you’re worth many men—­a brigade, or a division, maybe.  You are more use to us than many men who go out there to fight.  You do great things toward winning the war every day.  No, Harry, there is work for every man in Britain to do, and you have found yours and are doing it.”