WHERE WOUNDED MEN YIELD TO DAY DREAMS.

Restored to Health and Vigor in Red Cross Convalescent Homes.

The surgeon has extracted the impartially distributed bits of shrapnel from your works. The wounds have healed. The wheels go 'round again, and the clock ticks.

But it doesn't keep correct time.

This business of calling "Time!" on the Boche means so many broken clocks nowadays that the master-menders can't keep them on their tables after they're mended. So the question where they shall sit around while they're being regulated looms large.

The Red Cross answers that question with its convelescent homes. It has six of these in operation. A suitable place is found - sometimes donated - and management and equipment are provided by the Red Cross, while the army has furnished discipline and a never-failing supply of convalescents.

These homes mean that men who are scarcely hospital subjects, yet who can by no means go back to their duties, have a place that does what "home" does for the French or English soldier, what "home" does for any one, in fact, when the doctor gets through.

You know. He says: "You're all right now. It's only a matter of nursing and food."

But you know he's only looking at the works he's tinkered, and that the soul within you is grousing as it never did when the body was down and out. It wants something, and it doesn't know what it is. But if it doesn't get it pretty quick the works are going to get gummed again. You know your mother could find out what that dog-gone thing is right away and hand it to you on a plate. But General Pershing won't let you go to her. * * * And the War Department won't let her come to you.

Then you're taken to a Red Cross convelescent home - and there is the very thing you wanted! But you couldn't describe it even then to save your life.

It is a bit of coddling, and pretty surroundings, and women's faces, and light laughter and time to play and all that sort of thing. It is forgetting the crash of war and remembering that there are pleasant, soft voices. It's even such things as gaily-flowered sofa pillows to jam into a corner and make a nice lolling place while you read and smoke and talk. It's slippers instead of trench boots, or day-dreams in place of the nightmare of killing.