The Old Blood

Perhaps a real story-teller, who leaps into the heart of things, would have begun this story in France instead of with a railroad journey from the Southwest to New England; perhaps he would have taken the view of «our Philip's» mother that Phil fought the whole war in Europe himself; perhaps given the story the name of «The Plain Girl,» leaving Phil secondary place. A veracious chronicler, consulting Phil's wishes, makes his beginning with a spring afternoon of 1914, when the Berkshire slopes were dripping and glistening and smiling and the air, washed by showers and purified by a burst of sunshine, was like some rare vintage which might be drunk only on the premises. Complaining in a familiar way as it followed the course of a winding stream, which laughed in flashes of pearly white over rocky shallows, the train ran out into a broad valley—the home valley. Not a road that he had not tramped over; not a woodland path that he did not know; not a mountain trail that he had not climbed. The scene was bred in his blood.