an “affectionate regard and feeling for others which boys as boys, especially if strong and popular, don’t always, or indeed often possess.”  The poor parents were uncertain as to his fate for many weeks, but he finally died of his wounds in a hospital behind the German lines.  Then, little more than six months later came the second blow.  Geoffrey, the younger brother, aged nineteen, fell on September 29th, near Vermelles.  Nothing could be more touching than the letters from officers and men about this brave, sweet-tempered boy.  “Poor old regiment!” writes the Colonel to the lad’s father—­“we were badly knocked about, and I brought out only 3 officers and 375 men, but they did magnificently, and it was thanks to officers like your son, who put the honour of the regiment before all thought of fatigue or personal danger.  Such a gallant lad!  We all loved him.”  A private, the boy’s soldier-servant, who fought with him, writes:  “I wish you could have seen him in that trench....  All the men say that he deserved the V.C....  I don’t know if we are going back to those trenches any more, but if we do, I am going to try and lay Mr. Geoffrey to rest in some quiet place....  I cannot bear to think that I shall not be able to be with him any more.”

But how they crowd upon the mind—­the “unreturning brave”!  Take our friends and neighbours in this quiet Hertfordshire country.  All round us the blows have fallen—­again and again the only son—­sometimes two brothers out of three—­the most brilliant—­the best beloved.  And I see still the retreating figure of a dear nephew of my own, as he vanished under the trees waving his hand to us in March last.  A boy made of England’s best—­who after two years in Canada, and at the beginning of what must have been a remarkable career, heard the call of the Mother Country, and rushed home at once.  He was transferred to an English regiment, and came to say good-bye to us in March.  It was impossible to think of Christopher’s coming to harm—­such life and force, such wisdom and character also, in his strong, handsome face and thoughtful eyes!  We talked of the future of Canada—­not much of the war.  Then he vanished, and I could not feel afraid.  But one night in May, near Bailleul, he went out with a listening party between the trenches, was shot through both legs by a sniper, and otherwise injured—­carried back to hospital, and after a few hours’ vain hope, sank peacefully into eternity, knowing only that he had done his duty and fearing nothing.  “Romance and melodrama,” says Professor Gilbert Murray, in one of the noblest and most moving utterances of the war, “were once a memory—­broken fragments living on of heroic ages in the past.  We live no longer upon fragments and memories, we have entered ourselves upon an heroic age....  As for me personally, there is one thought that is always with me—­the thought that other men are dying for me, better men, younger, with more hope in their lives, many of them