I had a vision of yellow curls under a sailor hat and sunning out over a white embroidery collar. I saw little brown hands always finding something to do and doing it masterfully, reckless of consequences. I saw happy Christmases and birthdays made stupendously joyous by the coming of luxurious toys, which may have been wastefully extravagant, but which helped, anyhow, to build a foundation of happiness for the child and his sister and brother to look back to in after years. I saw battles in the nursery in which the Old Nurse and the under nurse were sometimes worsted and even received personal injuries. But, above all, I saw two scenes which had a bearing on the future of my Yeogh Wough, who was one day to go to the trenches in France and Flanders and fight for his country.
The first was the occasion of the christening of his newly arrived small brother. The scene was a London church, and after the christening ceremony the clergyman looked at Yeogh Wough and then spoke to me.
"This elder boy was only baptised privately, at home, I believe?"
"Yes."
"Then he ought to be received properly into the Church. I will do it now."
And he put out his hand and drew Yeogh Wough towards him.
The boy went deathly white and we who watched him knew that one of his attacks of nerves was threatening. The big, brown, velvety eyes were for a moment shrinking and wavering. Then, as if something said within him that when one is a boy of just six years old one must go forward with things and play the game, he steadied and straightened himself suddenly, lifted his big head very high—it was like the head of a lion cub—and, though his cheeks were bloodless still, went through the ceremony without faltering.
"He's got the stuff in him that heroes are made of," someone said to his father and to me. "He'd go to martyrdom just in the same way."
The other scene that stands out took place half a year earlier, when he was five and a half. He had been down on a visit to some relatives in the country and was talking about a particular pond which he had seen. Then his father began to tell him the story of how the famous American preacher Theodore Parker, when he was a little boy, was standing one day by a pond, looking at a beautiful flower that grew at its edge, when a frog suddenly came up out of the water. Young Parker took up a stone to kill the frog, but stopped because a voice within him, which was the voice of his conscience, told him that it would be wrong to take the harmless creature's life.
"Yes, fa'ver," Little Yeogh Wough nodded wisely. "I know about that voice. I've heard it, too. I'm hearing it now."