His letter was full of other things--little
intimate things that they two had known and loved together in the dear
old cloudless days of a century ago.
"I've been thinking of the daffodils in the garden at Ingleside," he
wrote. "By the time you get this they will be out, blowing there under
that lovely rosy sky. Are they really as bright and golden as ever,
Rilla? It seems to me that they must be dyed red with blood--like our
poppies here. And every whisper of spring will be falling as a violet in
Rainbow Valley.
"There is a young moon tonight--a slender, silver, lovely thing hanging
over these pits of torment. Will you see it tonight over the maple
grove?
"I'm enclosing a little scrap of verse, Rilla. I wrote it one evening in
my trench dug-out by the light of a bit of candle--or rather it came to
me there--I didn't feel as if I were writing it--something seemed to
use me as an instrument. I've had that feeling once or twice before, but
very rarely and never so strongly as this time. That was why I sent it
over to the London Spectator. It printed it and the copy came today. I
hope you'll like it. It's the only poem I've written since I came
overseas."
The poem was a short, poignant little thing. In a month it had carried
Walter's name to every corner of the globe. Everywhere it was copied--
in metropolitan dailies and little village weeklies--in profound
reviews and "agony columns," in Red Cross appeals and Government
recruiting propaganda.
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