In Orchard Glen

by Mary Esther Miller MacGregor

She read Jimmie's letter first. It was headed "Back of the Front," and was largely taken up with a list of the wonderful things they had had to eat for their Christmas dinner. It was a bang-up spread, sure enough, and with the boxes sent from home on top of it all, they ate so much that they couldn't even have run away if Fritz had come over to pay them a visit.

But the important part of the letter was the description of a Sunday afternoon he and Neil and Sandy spent together behind the lines. It was great having that day with Sandy. Of course he and Neil were always together, for Jimmie wished to assure them all at home that he couldn't blow his nose without Neil standing over him to see that he did it just right. But a day with Sandy was a treat, for besides being in another quarter he was an officer, and as hard to get at as the Kaiser. But they arranged a meeting this Sunday, and Jimmie guessed that Sandy bust all the red tape in the British army doing it.

"Neil and I had just come out of our ground-hog's hole and we had nearly all France on our uniforms, and Sandy was such a swell, all dolled up like a field-marshal that Neil said perhaps we oughtn't to be so familiar as to salute him. But we got a bath and got fumigated too, and it was real Christmas holidays not to have to scratch for a whole day. We had to salute Sandy when there was any one else round, but when we got him alone I paid him up for all the respect and I wiped the floor with a few yards of his officer's uniform. I tell you, Christina, he can't put me down now the way he used to. I'm as hard as nails and I'm as tall as he is. Sandy said I could be court-martialed and shot for it, but Neil refereed and saw that justice was done. I started out to tell you and Mother about that Sunday we had together, but I'll leave it to Neil, he can do it better than I can, but I want Mother to know that I agree with everything he says, and she needn't be scared about me out here. I'm all right."

"So don't cry, Dear, I'm all right here.
Oh, it's just like bein' at hame."

Sandy's letter told still more about the meeting; but Neil's letter went right to the heart of the matter. "I wish you could have seen us at our Battalion service, Mother, that Sunday morning. It wasn't very far back, and we could hear the guns booming as we stood in a quiet spot behind a shattered little village. We sang 'Faint not for fear, His arms are near,' the last hymn we sang in Orchard Glen church, and after it was over we met Sandy and we went off together, Sandy and Jimmie and I, to have one of our old-time Sunday talks, just as we used to wander off to the fields after Sunday School, we two, with Jimmie tagging at our heels. It wasn't much like home, though, just a desolate shell-torn corner behind the ragged remnants of a barn, but, somehow, the quiet took us back to Orchard Glen and home, and you seemed there. And we got talking about the contrast between our life out here and back there and the temptations all around that were so new. And we each stood up, so to speak, and told our experience, like a good old Methodist class-meeting, that would have delighted Grandpa if he could have heard it. And Sandy said that when he saw the devastation Sin could bring, it had made him want to be a preacher more than ever before. And then it was Jimmie's turn, and he confessed that something about military camp life gave him a feeling of physical nausea at first. For a month he didn't want to go beyond the Y. M. C. A. tent, and then he began to get used to it all, but he never had the smallest inclination to mix in it. He's the same bright, clean boy that left you, Mother, a great deal older and wiser, but no sadder, and you need not fear for him. We were saying that it was you who had given us our strength against temptation, because you never set anything but the highest before us and Sandy remarked that you had buckled our armour on tight before you sent us out to battle, and then Jimmie said, 'It's like being in one of the Tanks. You ride right over everything in the biggest show the Huns can pull off and nothing can touch you.'"

"I think that was a fine description of what you gave us, don't you, Mother? You had no money to give us, but you built and riveted a Tank with your years of hard toil, and you put us all inside and we are safe there forever. And so you must not worry about us. For even if we are called upon to pay the price, what does that matter?"

When the letter was read and reread, Christina was surprised to see her mother put it carefully away in the pocket of her skirt; and putting on her bonnet and cloak, she slipped out quietly and went away across the Short Cut towards the village. Christina wondered that she had said nothing about where she was going and stood at the window watching her with anxious loving eyes and wondering if she were wearing warm enough clothing as the wind swayed her bent old figure. She supposed her mother had gone to see Granny Minns, but Joanna dropped in with some Red Cross work on her way up to Mrs. Johnnie Dunn's for an afternoon's sewing, and told Christina that she had seen her mother sitting in the churchyard beside her father's grave.

Christina's eyes filled with tender tears; she understood. Her mother had gone with the boys' letters to share with their father the glad news that had lifted the burden from her heart.

Christina read all Neil's letter to Grandpa that night. It was no light task, but she could not bear that he miss a word. She had her reward, for he sang the 103rd psalm at the top of his lungs before he settled for the night, and the Hindmost Hymn louder and clearer than he had ever sung it since the day the boys went away.

And the next morning he read again the 91st psalm, and his old shaking voice rose high and strong as he came to the words that spoke the triumph over all life's ills, and for the first time in her life Christina understood them. "Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler and from the noisome pestilence.... Thou shall not be afraid for the terror by night nor for the arrow that flieth by day nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness."