development of an entailed spiritual estate, upon which his forebears had always worked honestly and in the cultivation of which his own honor was involved.

The evening was propitious, windless, and with a high, full moon, and we sat in the breakfast-room close to the open French windows leading to the terrace. A nightingale sang from some sapling alders growing just beyond the kitchen garden. For fully half an hour the song was continuous, and I found myself waiting eagerly for the recurrence of certain unusual notes, and if they failed to come I felt defrauded. When the bird ceased, the Major rang for Baker and said we would walk.

"Yes, sir. Which way, sir?"

Baker was exceedingly skillful in guiding his blind master; he had reduced physical and vocal suggestion to a fine art. He never touched the Major with his hand, but contrived nearly always to be by his side, near enough to give a slight pressure to the Major's elbow with his own. As we walked, Baker would drop apparently casual remarks indicative of the location : "Shouldn't wonder if Watson would put a gate 'ere instead of a stile;""Don't 'ear the owl to-night in the old oast;""County council ought'er buy this 'ere cottage o' Wade's and make the corner safe for motor cars ;' ;” “ Vicar ain't a-doin' much with is glebe this year; war sartinly do make a difference "--and so on, until we reached Petham Lane wood. There was no need to mark the place by human voice; the nightingales did that in a riotous symphony. It was impossible to tell how many songsters there were in the chorus, but at times the volume of music rose to such a crescendo that it seemed as if every twig on every tree in the spinney must be bending under the weight of a performer. There was one burst of such unpremeditated harmony that I felt the perspiration spring to my forehead, as one does under sudden and inarticulate emotion.

When returning, we came to an old inn which had once been a post-house. Its glory at one time must have been great, but its honor was now so tarnished that only the slender patronage of local farm laborers and the annual rush of cockney hop-pickers gave it an excuse for continuance. In a casual voice, as if quite familiar with such things, the Major mentioned that it was haunted. The moon was throwing unusual shadows upon the timber-seamed walls; a faint puff of wind made the signboard squeak ever so slightly but weirdly; the outline of a gaunt form moved unsteadily upon the lighted window, lifting a monstrously huge mug to his bearded mouth; a chain rattled in the barnyard; and when an owl hooted from a tree that stood in the coppice across the road, my imagination slipped its leash. What kind of a ghost could it be? A knight in armor? A pilgrim with a heavy wallet bound for the shrine of St. Thomas? A fat abbot slain in the roistering times of old King Hal? The house was not ancient enough for such venerable shades. Then a gaudy young cavalier of Prince Rupert breed? A lady of quality hasting to Sandwich or Dover with her lover and overtaken by her father and brother—a duel and a dripping rapier and a hasty burial?

Whether at the Major's suggestion or mine, I do not remember, but we went inside. The place was not different from any old wayside tavern-a bar on the right of the entrance, parallel to the hall, and a large room opposite with sanded floor and a long deal table running down the center. Two or three clodhoppers were smoking clay pipes over empty pewter pots, a sheep-dog lay asleep on the hearth, and the only ornament on the mantelpiece, a stuffed pheasant, was lusterless, sooty, and tailless. A square cottage organ, or harmonium, stood in one corner. The room was so cheerless and forlorn that we turned away after a glance. The rest of the house was unlighted; the landlord looked sullen and embarrassed by our entrance, and we passed out quickly into the road.

The story the Major told as we walked slowly along toward the manor was so unusual and disturbed me to such a degree that I wrote it down the moment courtesy permitted me to retire.

IV

At the close of the Crimean War an Irish sergeant returning vin France wooed a young femme de chambre and brought her

as a bride to England. They established themselves in the inn we have just visited. Near the close of the first year a child was born to theni, a girl, and within a week the mother died. The only voluntary obligation the father ever assumed was to have the babe baptized under her mother's name, Jeanne. She grew up as wild as a nettle and with a temper as quick and sharp as a nettle's sting. Unkempt, ungoverned, and unable to read or write, she took her place in human society, or rather on the outer edge of it, with hands and feet and tongue always ready to strike. That was the only lesson she had learned from her father. What else she knew, the stars, the seasons, the trees, and the creatures had told her. Whenever her work as kitchen slut of the tavern permitted, she roamed the lanes and fields and woods, letting the love of her little starved heart go out to the birds, but in a furtive, stealthy way, as though it were a crime. She hated men and doubted women and was afraid of the sunlight. But at night, as soon as the last customer had gone and her father had climbed the stairs with maudlin uncertainty, she slipped from the house and made her way to some familiar spot where she might listen to the nightingales pouring out their throbbing song. Gradually she became known to the whole countryside, from Stelling Minnis to Boughton, as an uncanny, evil-possessed child, and simply on the evidence of her nocturnal wanderings the old women gossiped about her scandalously.

When Jeanne was about sixteen years of age, a sailor from Hythe came to the inn as general helper. He proved to be a paying addition to the establishment, as he was musical, after sailor fashion, and could play lively airs upon the harmonium. He taught Jeanne to play. She was an odd pupil, quick to learn, but refractory, refusing to follow the sailor's well-known tunes, and preferring chiefly to improvise for herself. She would sit at the wheezy instrument, her head bent forward and slightly turned, her fingers moving slowly over the keys, finding chords. When one pleased her, she laughed aloud and repeated it many times in triumph. This so irritated her father that finally he commanded her never to touch it again. He drove the sailor from the house. Only the nightingales were left, and as long as they sang she stole out into the woods; when they ceased with the season, she used her unspent strength in gibe and taunt and curse for any who crossed her path.

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Two or three years passed in that way. Then she heard of the Christmas Festival soon to be held in the Cathedral; how she heard none knew, unless it had been from a chance customer, for no one in those parts ever thought to speak a friendly word to the strange, wild creature. And if she had been told that the choir were to sing Handel's oratorio, " The Messiah," she would have been not a whit the wiser, for she could not have known what meaning to put upon the words "choir," " Handel," "oratorio," and "Messiah." She had been to Canterbury once or twice, but it lay far out of her world. It stood for all the things she hated and feared. But when the day arrived she dropped her work, threw a tattered Paisley shawl over her head, and walked to the city.

It was true, there was music in the Cathedral; it seemed to stream out through those wonderful windows as she crossed the close from the Christ Church gate to the porch. As she passed through the door into the nave, waves of glorious sound flowed down through the dim pillar-broken depths from the organ above the choir. Jeanne was afraid; she dared not advance beyond a few paces, and there crouched in the shadow of the first great column. She was like a bird beaten down by a fierce storm; she was dazed and stupefied. Later she crept stealthily to another column nearer to the music.

Almost imperceptibly a voice breathed the first subdued notes of "Comfort ye my people, saith your God," rising into the purest intensity of confidence that "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low.'

Jeanne trembled with joy; and, fearful lest any one should notice and order her from the place, she knelt and made herself as small as she could. She wondered whether she was awake, whether she was alive, whether that was the beginning or the end of the music. A peal of joyful voices then rang out of the shadowy distance-" And the glory of the Lord”—and Jeanne lifted herself to her knees; then there broke such a torrent of sound as the chorus picked up the altos-" And the

glory of the Lord "--that she huddled close to the column ; when the chorus closed with the full force of triumphant emphasis. "For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it," she tore the collar of her dress apart and panted.

'He shall feed his flock like a shepherd "--that was a relief; she could bear it, enjoy it, perhaps understand it; but the chorus and the organ with its wide-open diapasons-they were too much.

“Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow." She knew what that meant. Whose sorrow she did not know, but sorrow was as familiar as the face of day, and she wept softly, tears of relief, for this was the first time sorrow had ever found a voice for her.

Now she was rested, and at peace. But when suddenly the first "Hallelujah" thundered through the Cathedral, Jeanne sprang to her feet; when the chorus passed into the mighty unison, "For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth," she was utterly stunned. She clung to the column for a moment, moaned, and then ran swiftly toward the door; before she reached it she reeled and fell in a faint.

That part of the strange tale, the Major assured me, came through a canon who had watched her from the time she entered the nave. He picked her up, carried her across the close to his house, and there, as she revived under gentle ministrations, he learned something of her emotions.

That night, or in the early morning, while deep in a drunken sleep, Jeanne's father thought he heard a piercing cry, but he could not be sure. When he went downstairs to begin the day's work, and entered the room that faced the bar, he found Jeanne lying forward across the open harmonium with a knife plunged sheer to her heart.

"There is one other strange thing," said the Major. "A half-witted man who worked about the place and slept in an unfurnished room just above that in which Jeanne was found dead, testified at the coroner's inquest that he too heard the cry but just before the cry he heard Jeanne playing the harmonium and singing a hymn he had often heard the dissenters sing in Petham village The Lion of Judah.' Curiously, I never heard that hymn until my man Baker played it on his concertina in India; and, and it is connected in my mind now, not only with that countryside tragedy of Jeanne, but with that splendid tragedy of our expeditionary force in the first campaign, from Mons back to the forming of the rigid lines in Flanders."

V

The following morning the Major became abruptly didactic, and for the first time he spoke of himself.

6

"I have never been able to think of God according to the orthodox definitions. They do not define. God is a spirit,' for instance. Spirit has no positive connotation for me; it is negative, the mere absence of anything material. Neither can I conceive God as love. Indeed, I cannot get a sense of reality into the word love-therefore it is useless to me as a symbol or medium. My parents died before I knew them. As far as I know, not a living soul loves me; and I cannot think of any one I love or ever have loved. I admire and respect many; I revere a few. But if the word, as used in literature, means anything at all, it implies a warmer, more intense, more exalted, and a more sacrificial feeling than anything I have experienced.

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But when I say God is harmony, it means something clear and definitive, something simple enough in its more primary expression to be apprehended by children, yet something so gloriously vast and sublime in its constantly progress ive forms that it engages the loftiest minds and engrosses the deepest emotions. Nothing expresses God so comprehensively and exactly as music. If you want the beginning of things, you must go, not to paintings or to science, but to Haydn's Creation. No theology or creed brings God into human life as does Handel's Messiah.' And nothing voices the neverfailing power of vicarious suffering as does Gounod's 'Redemp

tion.'

"Every afternoon," continued the Major, "I go to the organ

in the church and work upon an oratorio I am composing. Those of us who were in the fury of the war in its first phase in 1914 are just beginning to realize that we were working out the most glorious epic of the ages. At the time we did not know it: we were fighting as professionals and in a professional way. just as we had been taught. The war had practically no meaning beyond its strategy and its tactics, the traditional honor of the British army and the untarnished name of the several regiments. We never gave a thought to ideals and motives; we never thought of safeguarding democracy, defending civilization, saving humanity, or serving God. And yet, though none of us articulated it, there was something stirring in our souls of that wider, diviner issue, or we could never have fought and suffered as we did.

"And, curiously, that something got linked up in my case with a crude musical composition called The Lion of Judah,' a hymn sung by a sect of dissenters known as Primitive Methodists. There is something heroic and prophetic in the thing; it seems to belong to the awful moments when the odds are all against you; it has a way of making you feel that through the blood and pain and humiliation and reverses there must come the ultimate victory- that is why I have adopted it as my motif. There cannot be ultimate victory apart from justice, equity, truth; those qualities inhere in things harmonious and they inhere in God. That is a creed which needs no revision, and our men wrought it out through a hundred Gethsemanes and Calvarys from Mons to Ypres. It is for them that I write, and those who remain, maimed and broken, shall be taught to sing it to the world.”

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A FRENCH CHAPLAIN AMONG
AMERICAN SOLDIERS
IN FRANCE

It was my privilege to visit the United States last winter as a delegate from the French Protestant churches to the American Christian people. I met everywhere the finest reception, and heard a hundred times and more the same question: "How do you like America ?""Very much," was my reply. On my return home I was lucky enough to pay a visit to the American camps in France, and I could ask the soldiers: "How do you like France?" "Fine!" was the unanimous answer.

In many French towns the American service hat and the khaki uniform are now a usual feature of the street scenery. Even the French babies shout, "Américains bravo!" when the American motor cars run along the road. But the exchange of thought is not very large, on account of the difference of the languages. And yet our French people are desirous to make quite "at home" these boys who, from so far as the Pacific coast, come to co-operate with the Allies and win the war. Our leading men in the educational or religious circles are anxious to provide for the American soldiers opportunities to meet the best part of the French population, and not only men or women on the street, Our Protestant French churches are doing their best. In the Reformed Church of Dijon, a few days ago, I was preaching, and I read the " Message of the American Churches to the French Churches." When the service was over, I had a talk with an American soldier, the president of a Bible class in the State of Mississippi; he told me how deeply he appreciated the good and kind welcome he had received in that French Presbyterian church. “Think, before the war, I had not been away from my home for a fortnight! But I am no more alone, because I have found friends and brothers." This man was coming fifteen miles to attend the Sunday worship.

Every time I had an opportunity of speaking before American boys in the Y. M. C. A. I was thinking of their fathers and mothers whom I have seen in America, anxious for their sons" over there." I understand more and more the splendid and effective work carried out by the Y. M. C. A. organization. In the huts I found again the spirit of American homes, I heard the singing, "Brighten the corner where you are," and I saw happy and smiling faces. None was down-hearted,none was homesick. They have found home where duty detains them, and they have even found "Daddy in the old chaplain of the base hospital-a delightful gentleman, liked by every boy.

What a joy for one to bring to them the greeting of my nation, of every brother-inarms, to tell them of the splendid spirit of the French army in the trenches! "Don't judge France till you have met the best part of France, the stars of France, our men in the first lines." In fact, they don't criticise thoughtlessly, but they work hard to build up camps, barracks, railways, tracks, and to play an effective part in the big game of the world war. The more they work, the more they understand the endeavors and the marvelous stubbornness of France.

As a token of gratitude to the American friends who were so kind to me and to my companion when we were in America, I am glad to be able to assure them that everybody in France is desirous to do the utmost possible for a thorough