I will tell you of other troop-trains I have seen go out, with other boys waving to other women who strained their eyes and winked hard, hard, hard to keep back the tears, and stood still, quite still until the last car had disappeared around the bend, and the last whistle had torn the morning air into shreds and let loose a whole wild chorus of echoes through the quiet streets!

* * * * *

There was a mist in the air this morning, and a white frost covered the trees with beautiful white crystals that softened their leafless limbs.  It made a soft and graceful drapery on the telegraph poles and wires.  It carpeted the edges of the platform that had not been walked on, and even covered the black roofs of the station buildings and the flatcars which stood in the yard.  It seemed like a beautiful white decoration for the occasion, a beautiful, heavy, elaborate mourning—­for those who had gone—­and white, of course—­all white,—­because they were so young!

* * * * *

Then we came home.  It was near the opening time of the stores, and the girls were on their way to work, but their footfalls made no sound on the pavement.  Even the street-cars seemed to glide quietly by.  The city seemed grave and serious and sad, and disposed to go softly....  In the store windows the blinds were still down—­ghastly, shirred white things which reminded me uncomfortably of the lining of a coffin!  Over the hotel on the corner, the Calgary Beer Man, growing pale in the sickly dawn, still poured—­and lifted—­and drank—­and poured—­and lifted—­and drank,—­insatiable as the gods of war.

* * * * *

I wandered idly through the house—­what a desolate thing a house can be when every corner of it holds a memory!—­not a memory either, for that bears the thought of something past,—­when every corner of it is full of a boyish presence!...  I can hear him rushing down the stairs in the morning to get the paper, and shouting the headlines to me as he brings it up.  I can hear him come in at the front door and thump his books down on the hall seat, and call “Mother!” I sit down and summon them all, for I know they will fade soon enough—­the thin, sharp edge of everything wears mercifully blunt in time!

* * * * *

Then I gathered up his schoolbooks, and every dog-eared exercise-book, and his timetable, which I found pinned on his window curtain, and I carried them up to the storeroom in the attic, with his baseball mitt—­and then, for the first time, as I made a pile of the books under the beams, I broke my anti-tear pledge.  It was not for myself, or for my neighbor across the street whose only son had gone, or for the other mothers who were doing the same things all over the world; it was not for the young soldiers who had gone out that day; it was for the boys who had been cheated of their boyhood, and who had to assume men’s