"Make a Big Fire For Me."

"Make a big fire in the fireplace for me," wrote Richard Hall, an American boy in the French Ambulance service, in a letter to his mother in Michigan, Richard, whose father was Professor Arthur Graham Bell, of the University of Michigan, and who was himself a student at Dartmouth, had gone to France to take his part in this service because, as he quaintly and also nobly put it, he "wanted the reassurance of doing his share." It was the 11th of November, and the boy was already thinking about Christmas, although he said that he really did not dare to think about it or speak of it. But anyhow, as he wrote, he wanted the folks at home to light the big fire and think about him. Surely they did so; and while the fire still burned, something was happening to the boy. It was his last letter home.

At about midnight, on that Christmas night, Richard started out on his motor ambulance in the neighborhood of the battlefield. And, as he neared the scene, a shell struck him as he sat on his chauffeur's seat. The ambulance was wrecked. No one heeded. But next day another ambulance driver found the American boy's body buried under the ruins of the vehicle, and the French soldiers paid it such military honors as they could.

What about the folks at home? Well, they were illustrating the devotion which some American families have been showing in the last two years to the cause of France--to the cause of civilization. They had built the fire for Richard; but they did a good deal more. The mother became a volunteer nurse in the hospital at Neuilly. Before she came she had written a letter to Abbe Klein, the chaplain of the hospital at Neuilly, in which she said: "As I write, the clock strikes two, perhaps the very hour when life forsook our child. I am often awake in these early hours and my heart goes to you all in France." Then she gave her own service, and sent her other boy to take Richard's place.

The gift of these American mothers, whose heart thus goes to France, is an amazing thing. France is not their country. As the world goes, they are not compelled to make a sacrifice for her. But they make it, for very much the same reason that Richard Hall went to France because they "want the reassurance" of having met a world-crisis, a mighty and commanding test of right and wrong, even with the fullest sacrifice, if necessary, that a mother could offer. As Christmas comes on, we fancy that many a fire will be lighted in many an American fireplace in honor of all these American boys who have died in France for a great idea, and in tender memory, too, of the mothers who have sent them. Boston Transcript.