port.  He is the marvel of the French.  Hundreds like him are over there lending a hand.  They are about to handle in a year an army half as large as the other allies have been three years building.  Houses, furniture, fuel, food, guns, ammunition, clothing, transportation, communication, medicine, surgeons, recreation—­the whole routine of life for a million men and more must be provided in advance by these organizing men.  This work, so far as these men consider it, is purely altruistic.  They are sacrificing comforts at home, money-making opportunities at home, and they are working practically for nothing, paying their own expenses, and under the censor’s wise rules these men can have not even the empty husks of passing fame.  For their names may not be mentioned in the news of what the Americans are doing in Europe.  Yet wherever one goes in Europe he is running across these first-class men.  Their sincerity and patriotism may not be questioned.

But they are getting something real out of it all.  The renewal of youth in their faces through unstinted giving is beautiful to see.  They are going into a new adventure—­a high and splendid adventure, and while many of them may snap back after the war to the old egoistic individualistic way of looking at life, their examples will persist, and their lives, when they go back to the old rut, will never be the same lives that they were before.

But here is a story, an American story which has in it the makings of a hero tale.  It came to us in Paris, bit by bit.  We saw it and no one told it to us.  Yet here it is, and it should begin in form.  Once upon a time in America when the people were changing their gods, a certain major god of finance named James Hazen Hyde, head of a great insurance company, fell into disfavour; and the people, changing their gods, cast him away.  If men had been serving the old gods they would have said, “Go it while you’re young,” to the youth, but instead they said unpleasant things.  So he went to France and vanished from the map, but he did not entirely understand why he was banished.  He had done nothing that other young gods did not do and he was amazed, but he faded.  He lived in Paris as an exile, not as a god, and he couldn’t for the life of him tell why.  But when the war came he had a mighty human desire to serve his country; just to serve, mind you, not to be exalted.  He was fifty years old, too old to pack a rifle; too old to mount an airship; too old to stop a bullet without taking two or three other good men and true, younger than he, to watch him.  So he had hard work to find service.  Then along came the American Red Cross and it wanted servants—­not major generals, not even captains; but just chauffeurs and interpreters and errand boys and things.  And young Jimmy Hyde, who had been the Prince of Wales of the younger gods of fashionable finance, and who was cast out when the people changed their gods, came to Red Cross headquarters with his two cars, and offered them and himself to serve.  And they put him in a uniform, with a Sam Browne belt, and a Red Cross on his cap; and it was after all his country’s uniform, and he was a servant of his country.  And men say that even in the days of his young godhood he was not so happy, nor did his face shine in such pride as it shines today.  For he is a man.  He serves.