heard it sung with more tenderness, nor have I heard it sung in more beautiful voice.  That young lad was singing his heart out to those other boys.  He had not been up front himself as yet, for he was in a base port attending to his duties, which were just as important as those up front, but it was hard for him to see it that way.  So he loved and respected these other lads who had, to his way of thinking, been more fortunate than he, because they had seen actual fighting.  He respected them because of their wounds, and he wanted to help them.  So he lifted that rich, sweet, sympathetic tenor voice until the great hut rang with the old, old song, and hearts were melted everywhere.  I saw, back in the audience, a group of nurses with bowed heads.  They knew what the rosary meant to those who suffer and die in the Catholic faith.  They, too, had memories of that beautiful song.  A group of officers, including a major, all wounded, listened with heads bowed.

As I sat on the crude stage and saw the effects of his magical voice on this crowd I got to thinking of what this war is meaning to that fine understanding of those who count the beads of the rosary and those who do not.  I had seen so many examples of fine fraternal fellowship between Catholic and Protestant that I felt that I ought to put it down in some permanent form.

There is a true story of one of our Y. M. C. A. secretaries who was called to the bedside of a dying Catholic boy.  There was no priest available, and the boy wanted a rosary so badly.  In his half-delirium he begged for a rosary.  This young Protestant Y. M. C. A. secretary started out for a French village, five miles away, on foot, to try to find a rosary for this sick Catholic boy, and after several hours’ search he found a peasant woman whom he made understand the emergency of the situation, and he got the loan of the rosary and took it back through five miles of mud to the bedside of that Catholic lad, and comforted him with the feel of it in his fevered hands and the hope of it in his fevered soul.  When I heard this story it stirred me to the very fountain depths, but I have seen so much of this fine spirit of service in the Y. M. C. A. since then that I have come to know that as far as the Y. M. C. A. is concerned all barriers of church narrowness are entirely swept away.

I have had most delightful comradeship since I have been in France in one great area as religious director with two Knights of Columbus secretaries and one father—­Chaplain Davis—­all of whom say freely and eagerly:  “We have never had anything but the finest spirit of co-operation and friendship from the Y. M. C. A.”

“Why,” added Chaplain Davis, a Catholic priest, “why, the first Sunday I was here, when I had no place to take my boys for mass, a secretary came to me and offered me the hut.  It has always been that way.”

The story of the French priest who confessed a dying Catholic boy through a Y. M. C. A. Protestant secretary interpreter, in a Y. M. C. A. hut, has been told far and wide, but it is only illustrative of the broadening lines of Catholicism and the wider fraternal relations of all professed Christians.