They need no comment, such stories as these. Here are humble heroes, martyrs of duty; here is the poor heart of humanity, with its infinite power of attachment. We have scarcely heard of anything more touching than the tears of these rough men for their “poor old lady.”
We saw a letter the other day from a transport driver describing, to a relative in England, the meeting with an old friend on the bloodstained, shell-battered road at the back of Arras. This man had been the driver of a motor omnibus in a country district at home.
“What do you think?” he writes. “You’ll never believe! If I didn’t come across old Eliza! Me that drove her for more than three years. I knew her at once, poor old girl! knocked about as she was; I’d have known her anywhere, by the shape of her, knowing her in and out as I did those years, every bit of her. She was a bit the worse for wear, but she was fit for a lot yet; a trifle rattley; but there’s a deal of life in her. I can’t tell you what I felt when I came across her so sudden. There, I couldn’t help patting her and patting her! Poor old Eliza! To think of her and me meeting again like that, both of us doing our bit, like!”
This fourth day of July brings us the third of the rain and thunder squalls which have followed the great drought.
Japhet says, relaxing to something approaching a smile, that he doesn’t see why this should not end by being a nice garden, and that the earth is in very good heart.
Dear English earth, it has need to be in good heart! Who knows what it may yet have to bear and give?
The Villino garden wears the war-time stamp, at least to its owners’ eye! The Signora, who has always hitherto plunged at a horticultural list the moment there was a gap in her borders that needed filling or a mistake that needed repairing, which could not be done to her sense of perfection “out of stock,” has had to teach economy to wait on necessity, and ingenuity on both. The result is not really gratifying. In all her long experience economy has never been gratifying in any branch of life. But even if the money were there for extravagance--which it isn’t--thrift has become a positive instead of a negative virtue.
“Thou shalt not spend” is now nearly as urgent a commandment as “Thou shalt not steal.”