They were standing in the midst of a crowd in the market square at Midbury in the pleasant sunshine of a September afternoon. It was market day, and a meeting to aid recruiting was being held outside the butter market. Up to the present the speakers had not made much impression on their audience; but now, as the chairman announced that Captain Basset would address the meeting, a sudden hush fell on the crowd, and all eyes were fixed on the man who, it was well known, had lost his sight in the service of his country.
Captain Basset looked every inch a soldier as, guided by Warner, he mounted the platform which had been erected for the speakers. With head erect he made his appeal. Duty was calling the young men present to come forward and help their fellow-countrymen, who had already responded to their king's and country's call, to fight in the righteous cause for which the great British nation had become a nation in arms; and Duty, he reminded them, was God's voice to which no man, certainly no Christian man, dare turn a deaf ear.
"That's right!" Donald overheard an old farmer remark, as Captain Basset ceased speaking; "I've lost one son in Flanders already and another's just gone to the Dardanelles—I'd rather lose him, too, than feel he'd shirked his duty, that I would!"
There was a sudden movement in the crowd. Several young men were pushing towards the platform. A way was made for them at once.
"Capital!" Donald whispered to Mr. Basset, "four—no, five recruits!"
Before the meeting was over a dozen more had volunteered, making the total seventeen.
"It was your father who got them," Donald told Josephine in the evening, when he discussed the recruiting meeting with her and his sister in the schoolroom at the Glen; "he spoke so well, and he has such a beautifully clear voice that one could hear every word he said. I heard lots of people say how sorry they were he was blind."
"Perhaps they would not have listened to him with so much attention if he had not been blind," remarked May shrewdly; "every one realizes what a terrible affliction blindness is."
"But father says he is sure that as time goes on he will feel it less and less," Josephine said quickly, "he finds already that it is not nearly such a block to him in many ways as he thought it would be. He is learning to read very fast, and—oh, do you know who invented Braille?"
"No!" May and Donald answered, and the former added: "Whoever it was must have been very clever indeed."