One of the blue and white nurses came to her and said, gently, “Is it very bad, Miss North?”

[Sidenote:  Intense Pain]

“Pretty bad,” she gasped.  Then she tried to smile, but her white lips quivered piteously.  The woman with the kind, calm face came back with a shining bit of silver in her hand.  There was a sharp stab in Barbara’s arm, and then, with incredible quickness, peace.

“What was it?” she asked, wondering.

“Poppies,” answered the nurse.  “They bring forgetfulness.”

“Barbara,” said the old man, sadly, “I wish I could help you bear it——­”

“So you can, Daddy.”

“But how?”

“Don’t be afraid for me—­it’s coming out all right.  And make me a little song.”

“I couldn’t—­to-day.”

“There is always a song,” she reminded him.  “Think how many times you have said to me, ‘Always make a song, Barbara, no matter what comes.’”

The old man stirred uneasily in his chair.  “What about, dear?”

“About the sea.”

[Sidenote:  Song of the Sea]

“The sea is so vast that it reaches around the world,” he began, hesitatingly.  “It sings upon the shore of every land, from the regions of perpetual ice and snow to the far tropic islands, where the sun forever shines.  As it lies under the palms, all blue and silver, crooning so softly that you can scarcely hear it, you would not think it was the same sea that yesterday was raging upon an ice-bound shore.

“If you listen to its ever-changing music you can hear almost anything you please, for the sea goes everywhere.  Ask, and the sea shall sing to you of the frozen north where half the year is darkness and the impassable waste of waters sweeps across the pole.  Ask, and you shall hear of the distant islands, where there has never been snow, and the tide may even bring to you a bough of olive or a leaf of palm.

[Sidenote:  Song of the Sea]

“Ask, and the sea will give you red and white coral, queer shells, mystically filled with its own weird music, and treasures of fairy-like lace-work and bloom.  It will sing to you of cool, green caves where the waves creep sleepily up to the rocks and drift out drowsily with the ebb of the tide.

“It will sing of grey waves changing to foam in the path of the wind, and bring you the cry of the white gulls that speed ahead of the storm.  It will sing to you of mermen and mermaids, chanting their own melodies to the accompaniment of harps with golden strings.  Listen, and you shall hear the songs of many lands, merged into one by the sea that unites them all.

“It bears upon its breast the great white ships that carry messages from one land to another.  Silks and spices and pearls are taken from place to place along the vast highways of the sea.  And if, sometimes, in a blinding tumult of terror and despair, the men and ships go down, the sea, remorsefully, brings back the broken spars, and, at last, gives up the dead.