Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The tag has been all but
outworn during these unending days of death; it has become almost
a cant phrase which the judicious shrink from using. Yet to
hundreds of thousands of mourning men and women there has been
nothing but its truth to bring consolation. They are conscious of
the supreme sacrifice and thereby are ennobled. The cause in which
they made it becomes more sacred. The community of grief raises
human dignity. In England, at any rate, there are no widows of
Ashur. All are silent in their lamentations. You see little black
worn in the public ways. The Fenimores mourned for their only son,
the idol of their hearts; but the manifestation of their grief was
stoical compared with their unconcealed desolation on the occasion
of a tragedy that occurred the year before.

Towards the end of the preceding June their only daughter, Althea,
had been drowned in the canal. Here was a tragedy unrelieved,
stupid, useless. Here was no consoling knowledge of glorious
sacrifice; no dying for one's country. There was no dismissing it
with a heroic word that caught in the throat.

I have not started out to write this little chronicle of
Wellingsford in order to weep over the pain of the world. God
knows there is in it an infinity of beauty, fresh revelations of
which are being every day unfolded before my eyes.

If I did not believe with all my soul that out of Darkness cometh
Light, I would take my old service revolver from its holster and
blow out my brains this very minute. The eternal laughter of the
earth has ever since its creation pierced through the mist of
tears in which at times it has been shrouded. What has been will