I never heard an Indian really laugh before that day.  The hills resounded with Josef’s shouts.  We laughed, Josef and I, till we were weak, and for a good minute Aristophe sprawled in the lake, with the frog anchored as if till Kingdom come on his middle, and howled lusty howls while we laughed.  Then Josef fished the frog and got him off the Tin Lizzie’s lungs.  And Aristophe, weeping, scrambled into the boat.  And as we went home in the cool forest twilight, up the portage by the rushing, noisy rapids, Josef, walking before us, carrying the landing-net full of frogs’ legs, shook with laughter every little while again, as Aristophe, his wet strong young legs, the only section of him showing, toiled ahead up the winding thread of a trail, carrying the inverted canoe on his head.

It was this adventure which came to me and seized me and carried me a thousand miles northward into Canadian forest as I looked at the frogs’ legs on my plate at the Cosmic Club, and did not listen to my cousin, the Colonel, talking military tactics.

The mental review took an eighth of the time it has taken me to tell it.  But as I shook off my dream of the woods, I realized that, while Thornton still talked, he had got out of his uninteresting rut into his interesting one.  Without hearing what he said I knew that from the look of the men’s faces.  Each man’s eyes were bright, through a manner of mistiness, and there was a sudden silence which was perhaps what had recalled me.

“It’s a war which is making a new standard of courage,” spoke the young Governor in the gentle tone which goes so oddly and so pleasantly with his bull-dog jaw.  “It looks as if we were going to be left with a world where heroism is the normal thing,” spoke the Governor.

“Heroism—­yes,” said Bobby, and I knew with satisfaction that he was off on his own line, the line he does not fancy, the line where few can distance him.  “Heroism!” repeated Bobby, “It’s all around out there.  And it crops out—­” he begun to smile—­“in unsuspected places, from varied impulses.”

He was working his way to an anecdote.  The men at the table, their chairs twisted towards him, sat very still.

“What I mean to say is,” Bobby began, “that this war, horrible as it is, is making over human, nature for the better.  It’s burning out selfishness and cowardice and a lot of faults from millions of men, and it’s holding up the nobility of what some of them do to the entire world.  It takes a character, this debacle, and smashes out the littleness.  Another thing is curious.  If a small character has one good point on which to hang heroism, the battle-spirit searches out that point and plants on it the heroism.  There was a stupid young private in my command who—­but I’m afraid I’m telling too many war stories,” Bobby appealed, interrupting himself.  “I’m full of it, you see, and when people are so good, and listen—­” He stopped, in a confusion which is not his least attractive manner.