The Next of Kin: Those who Wait and Wonder

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heartaches and homesickness a-plenty, without going away with their memories charged with a picture of their mothers i

strong on this theme, not having a very good grip on it ourselves, I am afraid. We simply harangued each other on the idleness of tears at stations. Every one of us had

you simply cannot eat breakfast when you look round the table and see every chair filled,-even the five-year-old fellow is on hand,-and know that a long, weary time is ahe

th a high hand and great spirits, and said something to every one of the girls who brought him candy, telling one that he would remember her in his will, promising another that he would mar

ked hard, hard, hard to keep back the tears, and stood still, quite still until the last car had disappeared around the bend, a

elegraph poles and wires. It carpeted the edges of the platform that had not been walked on, and even covered the black roofs of the station buildings and the flatcars which stood in the y

y by. The city seemed grave and serious and sad, and disposed to go softly.... In the store windows the blinds were still down-ghastly, shirred white things which reminded me uncomfortably of the li

it is full of a boyish presence!... I can hear him rushing down the stairs in the morning to get the paper, and shouting the headlines to me as he brings it up. I can hear him come in at the front do

that day; it was for the boys who had been cheated of their boyhood, and who had to assume men's burdens, although in years they were but children. The saddest places of all the world to-day are not the battle fields, or the hospitals, or the cross-marked hillsides where the brave ones are buried; the saddest places are the deserted campus and playgrounds where they should be playing; the empty seats in colleges, where they should be sitting; the spaces in the ranks of happy, boisterous schoolboys, from which the brave boy

and met the souls of the mothers of all countries, who had come there, like me, to mourn ... and