Petunia again: Sketches

Such a week as we have had in the country! You talk about the stopping of the cars giving people a welcome rest in the evenings. Well, we have no cars to stop, and only three trains a week, and still we can manage eleven social engagements in six days! Three of them were welcomes to soldiers. Seventy-eight went away from this district, and every time one returns (and that is very often now, thank God!) all the houses along the route from the railway station are decorated with flags. I expect that sometimes he wonders why people who take the trouble to decorate in his honour do not come out to wave. When he gets to the Institute he knows, because we are all there waiting to cheer and make speeches. Nothing about our boys has been finer than the courtesy with which they take our cheers and let us say “Thank you.” It relieves us, but oh, how it embarrasses them! They redden, but they smile, and are far from looking foolish when they “get up to reply.” The speeches aren’t always very easy to reply to, either, because what we call courage and duty-doing they think just a matter of course. Perhaps nothing more to the point has ever been said to them than this spontaneous outburst in one speech:—“By Jo, we are glad to see you.” It was worth all the rest about gallantry, and endurance, and honour, and so on. We thought all that, too, but just then what was delighting us was to see them. We had missed them, and now they were back and we would meet them in our daily lives again. And next morning their mothers would wake up happy because George and Clem were safe back, actually in the house in their own room at that moment!

Well, besides these official (and yet quite informal) welcomes there was also a large private party where another soldier, welcomed some time before, was to dance and talk with his friends, and there was also a Butterfly Fair, because now the war is over we simply must have a piano for the Sunday School Kindergarten. And there was the Red Cross meeting, and a Home Mission meeting, and the literary society, and choir practice, and a Band of Hope concert, and, of course, football on Saturday, for most of our players are coming back again now, though there are some we shall never see.