most--personnel--selfeesh--because an Hurong safe my life dere is six
mont', when ze Boches make ze drive of ze mont' of March."

At this moment food arrived in a flurry, and I lost what came after. But
I had forgotten the Château Frontenac; I had forgotten the group of
officers, serious and responsible, who sat on at the next table. I had
forgotten even the war. A word had sent my mind roaming. "Huron!" Memory
and hope at that repeated word rose and flew away with me. Hope first.
Tomorrow I was due to drop civilization and its tethers.

"Allah does not count the days spent out of doors." In Walter Pater's
story of "Marius the Epicurean" one reads of a Roman country-seat called
"Ad Vigilias Albas," "White Nights." A sense of dreamless sleep distils
from the name. One remembers such nights, and the fresh world of the
awakening in the morning. There are such days. There are days which
ripple past as a night of sleep and leave a worn brain at the end with
the same satisfaction of renewal; white days. Crystal they are, like the
water of streams, as musical and eventless; as elusive of description as
the ripple over rocks or brown pools foaming.

The days and months and years of a life race with accelerating pace and
youth goes and age comes as the days race, but one is not older for the
white days. The clock stops, the blood runs faster, furrows in gray
matter smooth out, time forgets to put in tiny crow's-feet and the extra
gray hair a week, or to withdraw by the hundredth of an ounce the oxygen
from the veins; one grows no older for the days spent out of doors.
Allah does not count them.

It was days like these which hope held ahead as I paid earnest attention
to the good food set before me. And behold, beside the pleasant vision