Another woman told of how much she had given up for the Patriotic Fund; that she had determined not to give one Christmas present, and had given up all the societies to which she had belonged, even the Missionary Society, and was giving it all to the Red Cross.  “I will not even give a present to the boy who brings the paper,” she declared with conviction.  Whether or not the boy’s present ever reached the Red Cross, I do not know.  But ninety-five per cent of the giving was real, honest, hard, sacrificing giving.  Elevator-boys, maids, stenographers gave a percentage of their earnings, and gave it joyously.  They like to give, but they do not like to have it taken away from them by an employer, who thereby gets the credit of the gift.  The Red Cross mite-boxes into which children put their candy money, while not enriching the Red Cross to any large extent, trained the children to take some share in the responsibility; and one enthusiastic young citizen, who had been operated on for appendicitis, proudly exhibited his separated appendix, preserved in alcohol, at so much per look, and presented the proceeds to the Red Cross.

The war came home to the finest of our people first.  It has not reached them all yet, but it is working in, like the frost into the cellars when the thermometer shows forty degrees below zero.  Many a cellar can stand a week of this—­but look out for the second!  Every day it comes to some one.

“I don’t see why we are always asked to give,” one woman said gloomily, when the collector asked her for a monthly subscription to the Red Cross.  “Every letter that goes out of the house has a stamp on it—­and we write a queer old lot of letters, and I guess we’ve done our share.”

She is not a dull woman either or hard of heart.  It has not got to her yet—­that’s all!  I cannot be hard on her in my judgment, for it did not come to me all at once, either.

When I saw the first troops going away, I wondered how their mothers let them go, and I made up my mind that I would not let my boy go,—­I was so glad he was only seventeen,—­for hope was strong in our hearts that it might be over before he was of military age.  It was the Lusitania that brought me to see the whole truth.  Then I saw that we were waging war on the very Princes of Darkness, and I knew that morning when I read the papers, I knew that it would be better—­a thousand times better—­to be dead than to live under the rule of people whose hearts are so utterly black and whose process of reasoning is so oxlike—­they are so stupidly brutal.  I knew then that no man could die better than in defending civilization from this ghastly thing which threatened her!

Soon after that I knew, without a word being said, that my boy wanted to go—­I saw the seriousness come into his face, and knew what it meant.  It was when the news from the Dardanelles was heavy on our hearts, and the newspapers spoke gravely of the outlook.