Fifty years ago I stood with my father on that Bluff and watched the logs come down the river to the sawmill--his sawmill, into which he had put his total capital, five hundred dollars.
I remember well his words, 'My son, if you live out your life you will see on that flat a town where thousands of men and women will find homes and, please God, happiness.' Your mother and I watched that town grow for forty years, and we tried to make people happy--at least, if they were not it was no fault of hers.

Of course, other hands have been at the work since then, but her hands and mine more than any other, and more than all others together were in it, and her heart, too, was in it all." The boy turned from the window and sat down heavily in a deep armchair, his hands covering his face.

His heart was still sick with the ache that had smitten it that day in front of Amiens when the Colonel, his father's friend, had sent for him and read him the wire which had brought the terrible message of his mother's death.

The long months of days and nights heavy with watching, toiling, praying, agonising, for her twin sons, and for the many boys who had gone out from the little town wore out her none too robust strength.

Then, the sniper's bullet that had pierced the heart of her boy seemed to reach to her heart as well.