The reason for his looking less like a picture was that for two or three months he had to wear glasses. The beautiful brown velvet eyes, with their curling dark lashes, were not strong.

I wonder why it is that spectacles spoil the look of ninety-nine faces out of a hundred, whereas pince-nez give an air of style and importance?

Pince-nez make a poor man look well off, while spectacles, even with gold rims, can always be thoroughly depended on to make a multi-millionaire look poor. On the other hand, spectacles are honest, while eye-glasses suggest sharpness in the ways of the world and much toughness of conscience. Nothing could ever make me believe that a man who wears pince-nez has really repented of his sins.

With women, of course, it is not quite the same. No woman, however big a fool she might be, would ever take even to pince-nez with a view to improving her personal appearance.

It was partly to comfort Little Yeogh Wough for his mortification at having to wear spectacles for a time that we yielded to his appeal that he might be taken with us to Russia.

"He might be left at home. He's sensible enough now to manage the servants and the house and the dogs and everything for us, instead of needing to be looked after himself," his father said.

"Yes, in some moods," I agreed. "He is, of course, the best disciplined and most responsible boy at his school. He seems to be even better disciplined and more responsible than the all-Scotch boys, which is saying a good deal. But he has times when he needs holding in. After that day last week, for instance, you can't say that he is entirely trustworthy."

This mention of the "day last week" had to do with an unforgettable incident. The day had been a lovely one of blue sky and blue sea and high shining sun, and yet all through the long and glorious hours Little Yeogh Wough had sat in the house copying page after page out of a history book. For, thirteen years old though he was, he yet had so far forgotten himself as, in a fit of anger, to shake pepper out of a large pepper-pot over his sister's head and face at the very great risk of blinding her.

I had been doubtful at first between the respective advantages of a whipping and the writing out of these pages of history; but I decided at last on history because he was backward in this particular subject, and also because the sitting still for hours would be the greater punishment to him.

"You know, Roland, this would not have happened if I had been at home," I said to him. "Why did it happen because I was out?"

"They aggravate me," he said simply.

I knew how it had been. Old Nurse, devoted though she was, was of no use whatever for a child with a temperament, and had not perceived the psychic moment when it was necessary to send him out of the nursery. I should have felt it in my blood if I had been there, and the whole ugly affair would not have happened.

"You see the justness of your punishment, don't you, Roland?"

"You're always just, Big Yeogh Wough. I've never known you unjust yet."

So he had set himself to his pages of history, all through the long and lovely summer day.

He said once, later on, that I had never broken a promise to him, either. I had always been careful never to make one which I was not humanly sure of being able to keep. For promises broken to children are greater crimes than many that are punished at the Old Bailey.

So we had not been sure in any case about leaving Little Yeogh Wough at home; and when he pleaded to go with us on board the Peninsular and Oriental liner that was to take us and certain others on her maiden trip in the Baltic, we gave way far more easily than he might have expected.

"Would you have been very miserable if we had said No to you, Roland?" I asked him.

"No. I should have been sorry, but I should have remembered that text that you're always saying."

"Text?" I lifted my eyes in surprise.

"Yes. You know, that one: 'Blessed are they that expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.'"

"That's not a text. It ought to be, but it isn't. But it's a very good motto to steer through life by. The thing to do is always to expect nothing, but to try for everything."

And so it came about that on a certain Friday morning in August the brave little feet of the boy of my heart walked for the first time on the deck of a big ship.

I am superstitious—nearly as superstitious as Napoleon was. Little Yeogh Wough has always known this well, for all through his life, from two years old, he has been careful never to bring any hawthorn, ivy, or peacock's feathers into the house, and has always made the flower-women selling snowdrops strip the ivy from the bunches he had bought for me. I will not sing before breakfast, and I will not have three candles burning in the room, and I would not, under any pressure, have a new house built for me or even have an old house considerably altered. For this I know is true, whatever else in superstition may be nonsense—that whoever builds a new home for himself and takes a pride in it, shall have something terrible happen to him which will prevent him from enjoying his life in that home, even if he should ever get so far as to live in it. For, even in the days when I had not been stricken to the earth and did not believe in the Bible, I had always believed in the truth of the words:

"Fools build houses and wise men live in them."

One only has to read about the lives of the great millionaires to have proof that this is so.

But I am quite open-minded about Fridays. If anything, I think Friday is a luckier day for me than any other day. I also have a fixed conviction that neither I, nor any of those nearest to me, is born to die by the quite easy and pleasant method of drowning. So we started on a Friday without a qualm.

And I did not dream that, even as he ran about this deck and began to live this new life, he was starting on another stage of his training for a soldier!

"What a lot of portraits of the Kaiser we've seen!" he said to me one day, when his feet had covered most of the cubic space of Amsterdam, Christiania, Copenhagen, and Stockholm.

I laughed. "We really have seen a good many, haven't we? But you don't mind that, do you? I thought you rather liked his personal appearance."

"Well, he did look very fine at the funeral of Queen Victoria. I always remember that. But I don't see why he should be all over the place in these countries that don't belong to him."

In a palace in Stockholm his inevitable picture occupied an especially conspicuous position on the wall of a certain room. At the same time, the arrangement of the furniture of that room struck us as quite surprisingly ugly and unsuitable.

"What a pity to have the piano where it is!" I remarked to our guide. "It would be so much better over at the other side of the room."

"It used to be over at the other side, but the Kaiser came here on a visit a little while ago and had it moved. He's had nearly all the furniture in the room altered."

Little Yeogh Wough opened his brown eyes very wide.

"You wouldn't expect a man like him to take such an interest in little things," he said.

"It's only by taking an interest in little things that you can get big ones to come right," I told him. "Remember what I told you about Kitchener and the rails for the new line in the Soudan."

"Do you think we shall ever really have a war with Germany, Big Yeogh Wough?"

"Yes, dear, very surely. If it comes in my lifetime, I hope it will come before I am old, because there will be dreadful things happen which old people will not be able to face. It might mean almost a going back to savage life—even at home in England."

He looked at me as if he thought I could not mean what I was saying. He knows better now.

On the ship they called him the "EncyclopÆdia Britannica," and said he might be safely referred to when any information on any subject was required.

"If I'm still in the position I'm in now when that boy gets old enough to think of making a start in the world, I hope you'll let me be of some use to him," said a high Government official who was among the passengers. "You and his father are not thinking of the Army for him, of course. His eyes not being right puts soldiering out of court."

"His eyes will be all right in a few months," I replied. "But we should not think of the Army for him, in any case. By the way, there isn't a single soldier among the people on this ship."

No, there was not a single soldier on board. And yet, since then, I have shed tears for five of the men who were before me as I talked that day, and who have given up their lives for their country. Many others whom I did not know so well have gone over the awful border, too, and the rest are in khaki; all the rest, that is, who had something of youth still in their blood.

"Aren't the Russians splendid?" the boy cried to me a few days later. "They're just right, you see, because they've got the two sorts of men in them both at the same time—the football-playing, hard-hitting sort, and the other sort that loves poetry and likes beautiful things."

"Yes, you are right. That is just what makes Russians so fascinating," I said.

There was cholera in Petrograd—and we had told Little Yeogh Wough that he would only be allowed to go there once or twice and would have to spend most of his time waiting on the ship off Cronstadt, while we went to the capital, and thence on to Moscow.

But we had reckoned without Little Yeogh Wough himself.

Coming back from Moscow to Petrograd, we were thunderstruck to see, just outside the Empress Mother's palace, in the magnificent Nevski Prospect, a fine-built, boyish figure, that stepped out very gaily and held its head very high.

"Surely that can't be Roland!" I exclaimed in amazement.

"It certainly is Roland," declared his father grimly.

Little Yeogh Wough—wandering through Petrograd alone!

He was looking at a carriage drawn by four long-tailed, coal-black, fiery-eyed horses, and at the dazzling uniform of an officer who sat in the carriage. Then he hurried into a side-street and we got out of the droshky we were in and followed him on foot.

How much at home he was! how gaily he walked here alone in this city where the very letters of the alphabet over the shop fronts were strange and mysterious!

A man and woman who looked like Americans were walking in front of him and, just as these two passed the door of the largest house in the street, a man came out and accosted them. He seemed to be making a mistake as to their identity, and a babel of questions and answers began in Russian and English, neither side knowing what the other said. Then Little Yeogh Wough reached the group and stopped and began to talk.

"He must have been spending his time learning Russian!" my husband cried in astonishment. "He is actually putting the matter right."

We had come near enough to catch the boy's words—halting, jerky words, and yet clearly decent Russian, since they were understood. We seized him by the arm.

"What are you doing here alone?" we wanted to know.

"Oh, I'm all right! I've been teaching myself a bit of Russian. I know now what that word means that you noticed over the shop the other day and that you said looked like 'photograph.' It's 'restaurant.'"

"You enterprising little wretch!" I said, laughing.