The Cornhill Magazine (vol. XLII, no. 250 new series, April 1917)

by Various

FOOTNOTES

[1] John Frere was the eldest son of George Frere of Lincoln’s Inn and Twyford, Herts, who was third son of John Frere of Roydon, Norfolk. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge; B.A. 1830, M.A. 1833, 2nd class Classical Tripos, 1st Sen. Op.; Curate of Hadleigh, Suffolk, under Archdeacon Lyall; Chaplain to Blomfield, Bishop of London; Rector of Cottenham, Cambe, 1839. Married Jane B. Dalton, 1839. Died May 21, 1851. He was first curate of Wakes Colne, Essex, at that time held with Messing Vicarage.

[2] Possibly Sir Nathaniel Tooke, a celebrated politician of those times.

[3] Possibly Rev. George Rowney Green, Fellow of Eton and grandfather to the finder of this paper.

[4] These lines were written by Byron in July 1821:

Who kill’d John Keats?

‘I,’ says the Quarterly,

So savage and Tartarly;

‘’Twas one of my feats.’

Who shot the arrow?

‘The poet-priest Milman

(So ready to kill man),

Or Southey or Barrow.’

‘THE WASTREL.’

The black-faced sheep were scattering about the moss when David Moir stopped to shut the loaning gate. It was getting dark and the lonely fells rolled back, blurred and shadowy, to the east. In the foreground, peat-hags showed gashes of oily black among the ling, but some were filled with leaden water, ruffled by the bitter wind. Beneath him, in a hollow, his small, white farmstead stood amidst a few bare ash trees, and a dim gleam to the west indicated the sea. Moir was gaunt and a trifle bent by age and toil, though his eyes were keen. Sheep dealers called him a hard man, but took his word about the flocks he sold. As a matter of fact, he lived with stern frugality because his upland farm was poor and his younger son’s folly had cost him dear.

By and by his old collie growled and he saw a line of indistinct figures crossing the moss. As one left the rest and came towards him he recognised a young Territorial sergeant, who was a seed merchant’s clerk in peaceful times.

‘Ye’ll hae had a cauld day amang the fells,’ he remarked. ‘What were ye looking for?’

‘I don’t know,’ the sergeant answered, smiling. ‘The idea may have been to keep us fit, but we had orders to inquire about the old drove road and note anything suspicious. You’ll have heard the tales about signal lights and mysterious cars that cross the moors after dark.’

‘Idle clashes!’

‘I’m not sure. The authorities seem to suspect that something’s going on, and a strange motor launch has been seen off Barennan Sands; then the old north road comes down to the shore this way. I expect you know it?’

Moir nodded. The new road, which led through two towns, followed the water of Ewan down a neighbouring valley; the old one ran straight across the lonely fells.

‘It’s a green ro’d, but the maist o’ it’s no’ so bad. I hae driven a young horse ower it in the dark, and it’s no’ verra steep until ye rin doon to Ewan glen.’

‘Well,’ said the sergeant, ‘you may have a visit from Lieutenant Jardine and his motor scouts. They start on a patrol at eight o’clock, and, as they go round by Turnberry Moss, should get to you about two hours later. There’s a mystery about their job, but my notion is they’re after the strange car. Anyhow I must catch the boys before they reach the big plantin’. They’re a sporting lot and I don’t trust them when there’s game about.’

He turned away, and as Moir went down the loaning the hazy outline of a ruined kirk on the fellside caught his eye. His only daughter was buried in its wind-swept yard, and his two sons had left him. Tam, who was a well-doing lad, had joined the Borderers and been wounded in France; it was a month since they had news of him. Jimmy had disappeared a year ago, after Moir, who had crippled himself financially to save the lad from arrest, disowned him. The farmer suspected that his unemotional wife sometimes blamed him for harshness and grieved in secret for the prodigal. She had borne with Jimmy as she had never done with steady Tam.

When he entered the stone-floored, farm kitchen, Janet was sitting near the peat fire. Her hair was whiter than Moir’s and her face deeply lined, but her plain dress was marked by austere taste, and she had a certain dignity. Man and wife were of the old, stern Calvinistic type that is now dying out. The room was large and draughty, and its precise neatness had a chilling effect. A rag-mat, which Janet had made before rheumatism stiffened her fingers, was the only concession to comfort, but shining china filled a rack above the plain oak press. The hearth-irons glittered, and a copper jelly pan flashed with an orange lustre in the glow of the peats. The herd had gone home to his cot-house and there was nobody else about. When Moir sat down Janet indicated a Glasgow newspaper.

‘Townheid brought it ower—there’s nae news,’ she said.

Moir knew she had been studying the casualty list. Janet seldom showed her feelings and he could not tell whether she was conscious of relief or renewed suspense.

‘We’ll maybe get a letter soon,’ he said. ‘I met Ferguson on the moss and he telt me Mr. Jardine is likely to be here with his men.’

‘Then I’ll hae to offer them a bite to eat. There’s nae loaf-bread and the scones are getting done; but Euphie’s coming and she’ll help me bake.’

Moir looked at her thoughtfully. Euphie Black was a neighbour’s daughter and would have married Jimmy had things gone well.

‘Does she ever hear frae him?’

Janet hesitated. ‘I dinna ken; whiles I think—But I’ll need to see if there’s enough soor milk,’ and she went off to the dairy, while Moir sat thinking of his wastrel son.

Jimmy was clever and it was by his mother’s wish he went into the Glasgow merchant’s office, but when he first came home for the Fair holidays, Moir owned that his wife was right. Jimmy looked well and more of a man, and his employer sent a good account of him. On subsequent visits Moir was less satisfied. The lad’s showy clothes offended his sober taste and he did not like his city smartness. These, however, were not serious matters, and Janet showed no alarm. Moir thought he could trust her judgment, but had reflected since that her mother’s partiality had blinded her. Then one Fair holiday Jimmy did not come home, and before the next arrived Moir was summoned to Glasgow by the boy’s employer. He remembered the curious glances cast at him as he walked through the dingy office to the merchant’s private room, from which he came out hiding a crushing load of shame behind a stern, set face. Half an hour later he returned with a bundle of British Linen notes and a letter of three bitter lines to be sent to the boy’s lodgings. Janet acquiesced in his decision and never spoke of her son, but the lines on her face had deepened.

By and by Euphie came in and Moir went to the stable, where he found some harness that needed repair. He set about it and, as he was thorough in all he did, an hour passed before he was satisfied. When he came out it was raining hard, and on going back to the kitchen he found the baking finished and supper ready for the patrol. They are hospitable folk among the western fells and Lieutenant Jardine was a nephew of Moir’s landlord’s. The farmer sat down and watched Euphie knit. She was tall and had an attractive face, with firmly-lined features and steady grey eyes. As a rule, she was quiet, but her character was decided, and Moir sometimes wondered what had drawn her to his weak son.

Nobody spoke. A cold wind wailed about the house and the drips from a flooded roaning beneath the flagstone eaves splashed against a window-pane. After a time Janet moved abruptly as the door rattled and began to open. It had an awkward old-fashioned latch that few strangers were able to lift. The door, however, had opened and an indistinct figure stood, hesitating, in the porch. Janet got up and beckoned, but Moir sat still with his mouth set.

A young man came in, the water running from his light overcoat, and mud splashed about his leggings. He was breathless, but his face was rather pale than hot, and as he approached the lamp Moir saw there was blood upon his sleeve. The lad said nothing, but Janet went to meet him and put her arms round his neck. She felt him wince at her embrace, and, drawing back, saw, for the first time, his torn and reddened sleeve. Then with a low, pitiful cry she led him forward to the fire.

‘Come away while I see til yere arm. How got ye hurt?’

Jimmy looked at his father, who made no sign, and afterwards at Euphie with a shamefaced air. She did not speak, but gave him a quiet, friendly smile that offended Moir. It was not for nothing he had disowned his son, and now the women had, without asking a question, re-instated him. Janet helped the lad to take off his wet coat, which he dropped upon the floor, and then, after telling Euphie to bring hot water, took him away.

Euphie sat down silently when she returned, and Moir, who disliked untidiness, picked up the coat and, after washing the sleeve, hung it near the door. By and by mother and son came back, but Jimmy now wore a different suit that Moir remembered. It was an old one he had once left behind, but Janet had cleaned and pressed it and kept it for three years. Moir began to realise that he did not know his wife yet. He turned to Euphie when Jimmy sat down without looking at him.

‘It’s getting late and ye’d be better at home,’ he said.

‘No,’ she answered with firm quietness. ‘I was promised to Jimmy and I’ll hear what he has to tell.’

Moir made a sign of acquiescence and gave his son a stern commanding look.

‘What brought ye here?’ he asked.

‘I was hurt and had nowhere else to go,’ Jimmy answered in a strained voice. ‘I only want shelter for a few hours; not to stay.’

‘How did ye get hurt?’

‘A Territorial stopped me at a gate. He tore my arm with his bayonet, but the cut’s not very deep.’

‘Ye were hard put to it when ye tried to pass the soldier,’ Moir remarked.

‘I had to pass him. It was very dark, and there was a hole in the dyke not far off. I thought the others were after me.’

‘What ithers? But ye’ll go back and begin at the first o’ it. I sent ye the price o’ a third-class passage to Canada. Why did ye not go?’

‘The money was stolen.’

‘Ay,’ said Moir grimly, ‘I will not ask ye where! Gang on.’

Jimmy hesitated, but pulled himself together and told his tale. Soon after he was left penniless and disgraced, he found a friend in Fritz, one of the boon companions who had brought about his downfall. Fritz lent him a few small sums and by and by took him to see another man, who sent him to Leith. Jimmy did not mention what he did there, but stated awkwardly that he had got in too deep to draw back when he found out what his employer’s business really was. Then he stopped and said his arm was hurting him. The women looked puzzled, but Moir’s face set like flint.

‘So ye stayed and helped the Gairman spies!’

There was silence for a few moments. Euphie’s face was flushed and she fixed her eyes on the fire, while Janet nervously moved her hands.

‘Weel,’ Moir resumed, ‘ye can noo tell us how ye cam’ to visit this pairt o’ the country.’

Jimmy roused himself with an effort and went on in a low voice: ‘I came with them in the car now and then, by the old green road; you see I knew the way. They met another party at the waterfoot by Barennan Sands.’

‘Just that!’ Moir said grimly. ‘I ken why ye went to Leith. There was news to be picked up aboot the navy yards at Rosyth. What else did ye bring?’

‘Sometimes a man I didn’t know, and once a load of small iron drums. I can’t say what was inside. They didn’t tell me much.’

Moir pondered. He imagined that the drums held something that was needed by enemy submarines; but Jimmy’s frankness puzzled him. He did not think it was contrition, since he had no faith in his son. The lad seemed to have told the truth because he was afraid.

‘Where did ye leave yere foreign friends?’ he asked.

‘Where the road turns off to the old place of Whiterigg; they stopped there now and then, and there’s a gate, you mind. I got down to open it and they drove off.’

‘Why?’ Moir demanded, and the fear was plainer in Jimmy’s eyes.

‘I think their work must be nearly done and they meant to get rid of me. After all, I don’t know very much, and they’d reckon I’d be afraid to tell what I had found out.’

Moir began to understand. The old house at Whiterigg had lately been left in charge of a caretaker who obviously belonged to the gang, which indicated that the latter was well organised. The lad was perhaps in some danger from them.

‘But what for did they gang to the Whiterigg?’

‘To wait for high-tide, I expect. They’d run down to the waterfoot when a boat could come up the gut through the sands.’

‘That would be the way o’ it, nae doot; but I dinna ken yet why ye cam’ hame.’

‘Where else would he gang for safety?’ Janet asked in a pitiful tone.

‘Ony place but here! It’s to my sorrow he’s a son o’ mine. But let him speak.’

Jimmy’s narrative was not very lucid, but it appeared that he had been seized by a kind of panic when left in the road. He had very little money, something suspicious had happened at the last stopping place, and he thought his friends had betrayed him to the police, or might send somebody after him in the dark. He lost his nerve when he found the soldier in his way, and after getting past the man ran blindly across the moor towards home. When he finished Moir glanced at the tall oak clock.

‘Ye have aboot an ’oor, and then Mr. Jardine will be here with his motor scouts,’ he said, and taking his gun from a rack went out.

It was raining hard and very dark, but he made his way across the moss to where the old road ran down to Ewan Water, and stopped a short distance from the bank. A weak thorn hedge grew beside it, but Moir could see the pale glimmer of the water two or three yards below and hear the gurgle of the current, which swirled round a deep elbow-pool. A pair of stone gateposts stood close by, but the gate had been removed to allow the cattle fresh pasture, and Moir, who knew where it was, brought it back. He hung it to the post and fastened it firmly to the other with some wire from a fence. He had already lighted a lantern, and now examined his work. The gate was old, but looked pretty strong; some force would be required to break it down. Then he went up the steep hill away from the water and stopped at an opening in a dyke at the top. There was no gate here, and after hiding his lantern he sheltered behind the wall in a dangerous mood.

David Moir was a true descendant of the old Westland Whigs; sternly just and ready to suffer for his principles, he could make no allowance for a different point of view, and was subject to fits of cold anger which, while generally righteous, was tinged with fanaticism. His son’s treachery filled him with horror, but he was calm enough to see that the weak lad had been the victim of the men who used him. Well, he meant to settle the black account with them!

It was bitterly cold and he was getting wet, but his watchfulness did not relax. The growl of Ewan Water, brawling among the stones, rose from the valley and the wind whistled eeriely through the chinks in the dyke. For a time he heard nothing else, and then a faint throbbing began and grew louder. A big car, without lights, was travelling dangerously fast along the fellside, and as it came near Moir stood in the gateway holding up his lantern. He heard a warning shout and a rattle of stones as the locked wheels skidded, and the half-seen car stopped a few yards off. Moir turned the light upon the two men in it.

‘Which o’ ye is Fritz?’ he asked.

They looked surprised, but one said ‘You want to know too much. Why have you stopped us?’

‘My name is Moir. I want a word with ye.’

He put the lantern on the dyke and the light glimmered on the barrel of his gun. It was his duty to hand the men to the patrol, but if this was impossible, so much the worse for them. They had made his son a traitor to his country by taking advantage of his need, and Moir suspected that Fritz had first made him a thief.

‘You’re the young fool’s father, but we can’t waste time on you,’ said one. ‘Drop that gun and let us pass!’

‘Get doon!’ said Moir, who did not move.

‘Out of the way, or we’ll drive over you!’ the other cried.

The car rolled forward and Moir sprang back, hesitated as it ran past, and lowered his gun.

‘Drive tae h—, where ye belang!’ he said, as the car lurched furiously down the hill.

Then he stood and listened. A sharp-pitched throbbing now rose from the valley, through which the high-road wound on the other side of the water. It sounded like a motor bicycle, and Moir understood the impatience of the men he had stopped. Jardine’s scouts had got upon their track, but the chances were against the fugitives reaching the bridge where the roads joined. He waited with his face fixed like stone until he heard a heavy crash in the dark below. Then he picked up his lantern and ran down the hill.

When he reached the bottom everything was quiet except for the roar of Ewan Water and the hum of the approaching bicycle, but pieces of the broken gate lay about the road. Moir raised the lantern and saw a track deeply ploughed through the grass and stones, in front of which the hedge was smashed. Looking down through the gap, he distinguished something in the water. It looked like the wheel of an upset car, but he could not see it well, because the torrent foamed in an angry swirl across what lay below. If the men had not jumped before the plunge, it was too late for help.

A minute later, the motor bicycle rattled across the bridge a short distance off and sped towards him. It slowed and Lieutenant Jardine got down.

‘Have you seen a car, David?’ he asked.

‘I hae,’ said Moir. ‘Let yere machine stand. She’s in the pool.’

The young man followed him to the broken hedge and looked down. ‘What about the men?’

‘Maybe they jumpit aff. If no’, they’re under her.’

Lieutenant Jardine, who had seen no active service yet, caught his breath with a short gasp.

‘How long will it take to get her out?’

‘An ’oor or two and half a dizzen men; but ye’ll need to send doon the bay for tackle.’

‘I’m afraid that’s so,’ agreed Jardine, who had got a shock. ‘However, we’d better see if they’ve escaped and are somewhere about.’

They searched the hedge and bank on both sides, but found nobody, nor any footprints leading from the water. Then Jardine followed Moir to where the shattered gate lay about the road.

‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘it was justifiable; you warned them to stop. A herd told us about the car and I started at once. After a time I thought I heard her in front, but suppose I missed her where the old road branches off. But some of the boys will have reached your farm, and we must send for tackle.’

He left the bicycle and resumed as they walked up the hill: ‘When we stopped at the Mains farm, I sent out flankers to search the by-roads ahead, by way of training the men. One reported that he challenged and wounded a suspicious stranger who refused to stop and managed to get away. I sent him and another on to search the country and report to me at your house. It looks as if the fellow had something to do with the car.’

‘Ay,’ Moir answered quietly, ‘it looks like that.’

He said nothing further, for his mind was occupied. His duty was to give up his son, but he thought of the lad’s mother and shrank. Still, he would not shield him; if Jimmy was in the house when they reached it, justice must take its course. His heart beat fast as he opened the door and then he drew a breath of relief. A few men in wet khaki sat by the hearth, talking to Janet and Euphie, but Jimmy was not there. Moir thought his wife’s look was somewhat strained, but when she turned towards him the girl’s glance was steady. The men got up as Jardine came forward, and he sent one off to obtain appliances for dragging out the car.

‘Did you get on the track of the fellow you wounded?’ he asked another.

‘No, sir. I took the moss road without a light, but the machine went ower a big stone and threw me off. The front wheel was buckled, so I left her behind a peat-stack and cam’ on, without seeing anybody.’

‘Has Watson been in to report?’

‘Yes, sir. He kept the high-road, by the Knowe and Townhead, but they’d seen nothing o’ our man, and there was nobody on the road as far as where the drove track runs in. Watson’s gone back to watch by the bothy near the brig.’

‘Then it looks as if the fellow was hiding between where he was seen and here, but it’s unlikely that a wounded man would lie out on the moors on a night like this,’ Jardine said thoughtfully, and turned to Janet. ‘He might have crept into your byre or barn. Did you hear anything suspicious?’

Moir was sensible of keen tension as he glanced at his wife, but her face was calm.

‘He couldna have creepit into ony place withoot Rab, the collie, hearing him.’

‘The dog was outside and he’ll hardly let a stranger set foot in the loaning,’ Euphie supported her.

‘That’s true, sir,’ one of the men remarked. ‘He cam’ oot to meet us and it was no’ that easy getting by.’

Jardine hesitated, and Moir felt his heart beat as he glanced at Jimmy’s coat, which hung in plain view with the wet sleeve suspiciously torn. Nobody, however, seemed to have noticed it, and when Janet urged them Jardine and his scouts sat down to supper. When the meal was over and they were going, Moir said:

‘I’ll hae to drive a son o’ mine, frae Glasgow, doon the water to catch the early train.’

‘Then Jimmy’s back?’ said Jardine, who knew something about the lad.

‘He got hame late and needit a few ’oors’ sleep before starting again,’ Janet explained.

‘Very well,’ said Jardine, who took out a fountain pen and writing on a leaf from his pocket-book gave it Moir. ‘My men won’t interfere with you, but as I must warn the police and Territorials, you’d better take this pass.’

He went out and Moir turned to Janet. ‘Where hae ye hidden him?’

‘In the barn,’ said Janet, with signs of strain.

‘Then ye’ll baith come and hear what I say til him,’ Moir replied, and lighted his lantern.

A minute or two later, Jimmy got up from the straw among which he was lying, as Moir flashed the light into his face.

‘Have they gone?’ he asked anxiously.

‘Ay,’ said Moir; ‘but ye’re no’ safe yet. If yere Gairman friends arena’ drooned, they’ll be in jail the morn.’

‘Then they’ll think I gave them away.’

‘It’s verra probable,’ Moir agreed. ‘For a’ that, ye’ll be in Carlisle by then to enlist in the Borderers.’

There was silence for a moment, and then Euphie said ‘It’s the only way, Jimmy. It’s your chance of winning back.’

‘He’ll tak’ it,’ Moir remarked grimly. ‘If he doesna, he leaves here in chairge o’ the polis.’ Then he turned to the lad. ‘I’ll waken ye when it’s time. Dinna’ keep yere mither lang.’

He went back to the kitchen, and by and by Janet came in alone. Her eyes were wet, but she put her hand on Moir’s shoulder.

‘I’m thinking ye found the right way, David,’ she said. ‘He’ll gang.’

Harold Bindloss.

ON NIGHT DUTY.

It was a large base hospital in a large and dirty town. South Country men grew frank with disgust when they saw the pall of fog that hung for a fortnight outside the windows, yet things were little better when the fog cleared and the great buildings stood stark in their black ugliness.

Yet the night nurses would linger at the corridor windows on their way down to the dining-room. There was the glamour of night on the big city, mighty buildings silhouetted against a sky of dark luminous blue, towers that divided the stars, and far below in the street the ruby and topaz lights of the road-menders, with the glowing brazier of the night-watchman. And then dawn came with its chilling wind and its grey cheerless light that discovered, without love or pity, the sordid things of town—the dirty canal, the barges, the heaps of timber, the ugly money-making warehouses and factories. All this we saw—a world pallid and cold, with none of the genial glow of noontide.

The hospital never failed to charm me at night. Its interior aspect had a beauty of dim wards and red subdued lights over the ‘dug-outs,’ where a sister or nurse sat in charge. The long rows of white beds disappeared into the darkness, and the men in them had that pathos—unreal in some cases—of the sleeping and the helpless. At night they were all children—children who talked pitifully in their sleep of Germans and trenches and ghastly things beyond our ken. They called sometimes a woman’s name and professed next morning a guileless ignorance of her existence.

It was a hushed and mysterious world, where one whispered and walked stealthily, and yet where much was told and where life seemed simpler and more genuine than by day when the little tin gods were all awake. At that time I saw most of the mental ward, the most pathetic place in any hospital. Sleep was an unwilling visitor there, except to the orderlies, who, in the intervals of card-playing and button-cleaning, relapsed into the attitudes of the seven sleepers.

Night after night old Dad Hobson would stay awake till two or three o’clock, without complaint or murmur. Any man a little past his prime was called ‘dad’ or described as ‘old’ in this land of youth. And in sober fact Dad Hobson had seven children. He had been a miner before he made the great sacrifice that had left him maimed and insane. He was always courteous, always considerate. Even on those days when he refused to eat it was with a polite ‘I’m sorry not to oblige you, nurse.’ He believed himself guilty of some crime—he had murdered Sir Ian Hamilton—and in trivial ways too he held himself responsible for any disturbance in that much-disturbed ward. At times he was so much better that we hoped he was regaining his wits, but always there would come a relapse and his face would be downcast, and ‘I’m puzzled someway, something’s wrong. I can’t get things clear in my mind,’ would be the explanation. He had odd delusions too, for a doctor clad in a dressing-gown provoked his question to an orderly, ‘Is that Lord Nelson?’

It was a strange little party altogether in that ward. Hobson would lie there by the hour, dimly annoyed by Jimmy in the bed opposite. Jimmy had nearly died of wounds and later of pneumonia, but he had rallied, only to reach a state of discomfort and nervous temper that was liable to fiendish explosions. For the most part he was a lovable boy, with a curious charm of his own. Sleepless, like Hobson, till the small hours, he played cards with the orderlies. When things pleased him Jimmy was an angel, but at other times he was a fiend. A certain soldier, a clarionet player once in the Queen’s Hall orchestra, came to the ward. He was suffering from insomnia and melancholia. Jimmy’s drawling voice and his card-playing and, perhaps, his popularity annoyed the clarionet player, and they quarrelled. Jimmy merely remarked:

‘I’ll do for him—see if I don’t.’

The clarionet player was removed to the next ward, separated from the other only by a glass and wood partition.

‘He shan’t sleep to-night if I don’t,’ said Jimmy, and he took careful aim at the glass partition with his tin mug. He hit the woodwork and missed his enemy’s head in the next ward, so he fell into heavy-browed sulking, with the threat ‘I’ll do for myself.’ This is often a mere threat, but he did make an endeavour by biting up a blue-lead pencil—a tedious and uncertain form of suicide. The pencil was taken away and, blue-lipped and weary, like a naughty child he fell asleep. Poor Jimmy! He went to a Scottish asylum where many of our patients were sent for further treatment. I heard lately that he was really better and likely to be discharged.

One of the beds was occupied by Andy—Andy of the picturesque speech and uncertain behaviour. He came in raging under the effects of alcoholic poisoning. Such cases always spent a night or so in the X-ray room with a special orderly. I saw him that night, a flushed unhappy-looking boy, who was sane enough to speak politely and to say ‘Nurrse,’ with the delightful roll that our Jocks put into it. Later Andy came down to the ward, and was duly established in a corner bed. Here we got to know him for the loquacious rattle-pate he was. By day he was sane enough, but at night he was subject to awful dreams and fits of horror, which caused him to roll out of bed with an alarming bump. One night he thought the German prisoners were coming to murder him—two inoffensive boys with very little strength between them; another time I found him a hump at the foot of his bed.

‘Come out, Andy,’ I said.

‘I’ll kill you if I do, Nurrse; I’ve killed all my chums.’

But he crawled out flushed and weary. His face was coarsened and weakened by too much drinking, but it was a pleasant boyish face. He had, too, that quick imagination which gives vivid charm even to stories which tax belief. Andy told us wonderful stories of his doings at Loos and elsewhere. He had been a bomb-thrower, one of three survivors from a party of one hundred and sixty. The story was declared to be untrue by someone who knew him, but Andy could spin a yarn to keep Sister B., the orderlies, and myself in amazement round his bed. His own history, too, was a chequered, strange record. He had run away from home at ten years old and had joined a circus. He had been with Barnum, Wombwell, ‘Lord’ George Sanger, and travelled the kingdom from town to town. At fifteen he had enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders, deserted after a time, changed his name and joined the Gordons. He had been a champion boxer for—I forget the place. He had been everywhere and done most things, and was—poor Andy!—a nervous, dyspeptic wreck at twenty-four. Yet he had ‘a way with him’—a way that made us fond and disapproving at the same time.

The night before I started for a holiday, the Sister in charge had given orders that Andy was to wear pyjamas. He preferred a night-shirt. The point made a dispute. To humour him I said:

‘Andy, you’ll spoil my holiday if you don’t put on those trousers. I couldn’t be happy if I thought you hadn’t got them on.’

Andy was on the far side of a screen. There was silence, then a rustling, then Andy’s voice: ‘Nurrse ... I’ve got on they trrousers. I wouldn’t spoil your holiday, you ken.’

The next morning I saw the last of him. He was asleep. I put my hand on his head and said ‘Tell him I left him my blessing.’ It was carelessly said; I thought I should find him when I came back, but I have never seen him since.

They sent an armed escort from Aberdeen to bring Andy to a court-martial. Rumour went round the hospital that he had deserted in France, and would be sent back to France to be shot. How often in his sleep Andy had muttered ‘I won’t go back; I won’t.... I won’t.... I’ll do for myself first. They shan’t court-martial me ... they shan’t.’ Now it was explained.

When Andy heard that the escort had come for him he was quiet enough. He promised to pack his kit-bag and go quietly. However, he went off to the bathroom and was found trying to hang himself. They brought him back to the ward. He snatched a razor from his locker and tried to cut his throat. I don’t think he tried very hard—Andy was more dramatic than thorough. The escort went back to Aberdeen, for Andy was now in one of his raving, struggling attacks, and obviously unfit for the journey. When he was better he was handcuffed, his hands behind him, and so left for more hours than one likes to think of. I heard the story when I came back, and there was a chorus of pity on his behalf.

‘I could have cried when I saw him handcuffed, marching down the corridor,’ said a nurse. And the orderlies, even one whom he had kicked in the stomach, were pitiful for him—orderlies are a compassionate race.

The escort returned and Andy, strapped to a stretcher, was taken away to Aberdeen. We discussed his fate for many days, always with the decision ‘They couldn’t shoot him.’ Then rumour said he would get five years in a military prison, but meanwhile Andy sent us letters, written in lurid-looking red ink. He wrote from a Scottish hospital, and wrote gaily, jauntily, with no mention of prisons, desertion, or court-martial. His pride must have suffered horribly, for he had made of himself so gallant a figure, poor boastful Andy. He loved to write in the dialect that he talked, though he could, if he chose, send a fine English letter. Speaking of his very delicate digestion he says ‘I had a wee bit jelly for dinner; it slipped itself doon and just slipped back again. It doesna matter, what they gie me, it comes back. I try hard to keep it, but I canna.’ A few letters came from the large Scottish asylum where many of our mental cases were sent. They were always written in red ink, and concluded with a liberal supply of kisses (a matter of politeness this with many soldiers). Then the letters stopped, and none of us has heard anything more of poor Andy. He belonged, I fear, to the flotsam of life, and the waves washed him here and there.

A sad case was poor old Snakes. He was called Snakes because when he recovered enough to speak, he told us that he had swallowed a lot of snakes—no wonder that he never smiled. One morning I put the conventional question, ‘Are you better to-day?’ and received the sad answer, ‘How can I be better, I’m full of buttons.’ Another time he was full of watches that ticked in his ears, and again he had swallowed a tramcar—poor, melancholy old Snakes!

But the dearest of all our sad little family was certainly Alfred; Alfred Morgan of a Welsh regiment, never mind which. He was brought in from a military prison—sentenced for desertion, a case for a certain paper that champions the injured Tommy. Poor Alfred, with his wits all gone to pieces, his head and limbs shaking, his face working, seemed to us a living protest against any judgment but a doctor’s. I could hardly bear to see him, so hopelessly insane did he look. Death would have been far better than this doddering idiocy. The other men, sanest of the sane compared with him, tried to pet him and to coax answers out of him, but his mind, as Sister B. remarked, was a jig-saw puzzle gone to pieces. The pieces seemed to have no cohesion. He talked ramblingly of Bob his horse, of a dog, a canal, some medals, a picture, of Ada and the pigeons. He fancied the floor was the canal, and fished there with groping hands. Sometimes a word or a place-name would seem to rouse him, and he’d tell us the names of streets or of people: at other times he would shake his head and gaze vacantly round him, or look with that worried, bewildered look that made one’s heart ache.

It was Sister B. who did the most to fit the puzzle together. Every night she would sit by his bed and question him, bringing him back to the point time after time. We were filling in more of the puzzle every night. Alfred had lived in Birmingham, had been on a canal barge, had taken coal to some place; he had won medals, had a mother, and there was a picture that he remembered. Policemen excited him to frenzy, and when he saw one of the Force he would fling apples or slippers, or any handy missile, through the window. He could play cards too. There was a gradual mental development—the most fascinating thing one can watch. But it was slow, and Alfred seemed like a rudderless boat at sea till he met Jock.

Jock is a story all to himself. Suffice it to say of him that his vocation was to be a guardian angel. Every Scottish soldier is Jock in hospital, and perhaps other hospitals have found Jocks like ours—always unselfish, cheery, uncomplaining, infinitely pitiful to every trouble but their own; still I believe our Jock would outshine theirs.

Sister B. decided to bring Alfred on a visit to Jock’s ward. I must say that the experiment was painful. A surgical ward is a very cheerful place, and poor Alfred, shaky, bewildered, pitiful, was a figure to darken the sun at that time. But Sister B. was a nurse of brave experiments. She dared and succeeded; she was resourceful and passionately interested in her patients. So she brought Alfred to this sane and happy ward, and sat him down by Jock’s bed. Jock had been wounded at Loos in September, 1915, and had remained in bed for eight months with the occasional variation of an operation and brief respites when he was up and in a wheeled chair.

Among many pathetic things I had seen, none seemed to me more pathetic than the sight of those two war-shattered boys together. Alfred, nearly speechless, his poor wits all astray, tried to make himself lucid, while Jock, with infinite pity on his face, tried to understand and to help. The one looked like an angel of mercy, the other like some poor soul in search of peace. I don’t know how they talked, but somehow they made friends. Alfred was utterly unwilling to go back to his own ward, though he returned laden with cigarettes and apples. From that day the friendship grew. Every day Alfred visited Jock, and Jock, when he could get into a chair, returned the call. Somehow they talked. Jock has infinite patience and tact; he has graduated in the college of suffering and has learnt the whole art of compassion. He found out that Alfred knew most things knowable about football, that he was, in fact, a ‘real little sport.’

The ward adopted Alfred as a sort of mascot; he might do and have what he liked. He was just an unhappy child, humoured at all points.

Then arrived someone who solved the riddle of the medals and the picture of which Alfred talked so much. This man had seen a picture of Alfred boxing another celebrated pugilist. Alfred was a well-known character in the Ring—he had won his nine medals in various contests. To name a boxer was to set Alfred blazing with excitement and fearful efforts to stammer out some story of an encounter in which he had taken part.

We learnt more of Ada at last. Ada was ‘his girl,’ and he had left the pigeons in her keeping.

‘Poor Ada,’ I said one day to Jock, ‘what would she say if she saw Alfred?’

‘Alfred writes to her,’ Jock replied solemnly. ‘At least I write for him.’

‘But,’ I objected, ‘Ada may fall in love with your letters—it’s not fair to her.’

‘Oh! I put “Jock helped to write this” at the top,’ he explained earnestly.

What Ada thought of these dual letters I cannot say. I suppose she minds Alfred’s pigeons and hopes on. As for Alfred, I think his real love was for Jock. When he was restive and talked of going away we could soothe him by saying that he surely would not leave Jock alone. Everything he had he brought to his idol to share it with him. He made himself bath-chairman, and the two would go off to the one window that commanded an amusing street view. Together they hung out in perfect amity and understood each other in silence, for Alfred could barely get the words for even a short sentence. Alfred was the sheep-dog, Jock the shepherd.

It was understood that if one was asked to tea anywhere the other must go too. With Jock Alfred was known to be ‘all right.’ So things went happily until the inevitable parting. Jock was sent to a Red Cross hospital almost at a moment’s notice. Alfred was inconsolable; he wandered, red-eyed, forlorn, piteously incoherent, from ward to ward, searching vaguely and vainly for his chum. He shed bitter childlike tears, while Jock, for his part, suffered for Alfred’s trouble and his own. Such is the pathos of hospital. Later, Alfred was sent to the Scottish hospital of which mention has been made. He and Jock write to each other—perhaps some day they will meet.

As for Jock, I think a star laughed when he was born—though he can suffer to the full capacity of a Celtic nature. Good angels have him in their keeping and save him—only Heaven knows how—from being spoilt.

I was present when the sergeant of the guard met Jock being wheeled down the corridor. He interrupted the triumphal progress with six foot of stalwart manhood.

‘That,’ said he, ‘is by his looks the happiest boy in this hospital. I’ve never seen him sad, I’ve never heard him grumble. He’s the boy for my money—he’s a good boy, a great boy! We need more like him, we do!’

This was embarrassing, but Jock took it quietly and politely. More touching was the devotion of the corporal of the guard. ‘I had a son just like him, killed at Suvla Bay,’ he explained.

But Jock was of those who have fairy godmothers. If you imagine Bonnie Prince Charlie before his heroism was tarnished, you have Jock; or if you imagine Malcolm, Marquis of Lossie, in a lighter vein, you have him; and if you picture young Lochinvar, or Jock of Hazeldean, or some other hero of Scottish ballad, you see our Jock.

When first we saw him—it was an October day soon after the battle of Loos—he looked haggard, unshaven, and quite unlike the boy of a later date. He had a shockingly wounded knee, and was running a temperature. His dressing was a daily torture. We knew it was agony, because he whistled and sang the whole time and talked the most fascinating nonsense in beautiful Doric—only he gripped the head rail of his bed with an iron ‘grup,’ as he would have called it, and looked within measurable distance of fainting.

Movement was dreadful to him, but he had journeys to the X-ray room and to the operating theatre. Even in semi-consciousness he was true to himself—true to the self which was always pushed out of sight. I remember his sitting up just after an operation, and casting a distracted look round the ward.

‘Are the troops safe and in their places?’ he asked wildly. Reassured, he asked again ‘Is Paddy all right?’ Paddy was our orderly and a devoted friend of Jock’s. Then with a sigh of relief he lay down.

The following day he had an extension put on the injured leg. If you can imagine what it is to have a terribly injured knee, then to have it cut about, and finally to have it held up for half an hour or more while the extension is put on, you have just a faint idea what Jock suffered in grim silence. He was in the torture chamber but he never winced—only the youth went out of his face and a sort of grey old age seemed to come upon him.

I said to him later: ‘You’ve had an awful time of it to-day, Jock.’

He was still faint with pain, but he murmured: ‘No so bad. Oh! it was no so bad at all, Nurse.’

To these bad times belonged his polite requests, ‘Will you pull my leg a wee?’ and ‘Will you sort my leg?’—a phrase which always delighted me; but, as a Scottish captain asked seriously when I had quoted this latter request, ‘What else could he have said?’

Often in those bad winter days when Jock’s temperature rose with such alarming bounds, I used to wonder if he would ever see Scotland again. There was the dreadful bugbear septicæmia, and there was always the likelihood that he would have to lose his leg. But he had a good angel in Sister B. No one could ‘sort his leg’ as she could, no one could hurt him so little or so quickly as she, and no one could put in what he called ‘they tubes’ as she could—those deadly tubes that seemed to go by winding alleys and narrow desperate ways under his patella and right through the back of his knee. I think she staked her soul (and no one gave more life and soul to her patients than she did) that Jock should keep his leg. She was the first who dared to get him into a wheel chair; she taught him to walk again; she comforted him and helped him to face the long months, for even Jock had his dark days—more of them than he let us know. He used at these times to read Burns with devotion, and he told me that ‘Desolation’ and ‘Man is made to Mourn’ were his favourite poems, and exactly expressive of his feelings.

‘One gets a wee bit fed up at times,’ he confessed, ‘thinking one’ll never play football again.’

Football had been his joy, and somehow I think he went out to the war as to football on a larger scale. Quite casually he described the Highlanders’ charge at Loos. He was out of it very soon himself, but even at that moment his thoughts had all been outside himself.

‘I prayed then as I never prayed before,’ he remarked.

‘For the stretcher-bearers to come to you,’ suggested a listener.

‘No, of course not’—this with surprise—‘I prayed for the boys. Man! it was grand to see the kilts go by.’

Casually he told of his effort to save one of his officers who was severely wounded. But both of them were unable to move and they lay on the field for twenty-four hours.

Patrick MacGill in his terrible description of Loos tells how the Jocks were scattered, dead and wounded, on the battlefield, their bare knees gleaming in the pale morning light. But for many there was no return.

However, this is a happy story. I firmly believe that Jock is the true fairy-tale hero who marries the princess and lives happily ever afterwards, even as he deserves. But he will always suffer for the suffering of others. He confided to me with shame that certain books brought him inexplicable sensations rather like wanting to cry. ‘It’s a sort of soft spot in my wooden heart,’ he explained. All alone in the ward he would solace himself by singing Burns’s songs—with tears in his eyes. He accounted for them by saying the light had dazzled him.

To the sorrows of the ward he gave all his heart. One of the ineffaceable memories of hospital is the morning when Patterson died. Patterson, a man of very different temperament, had loved Jock too and had, during his long-drawn weeks of dying, found comfort, I believe, in the atmosphere of cheeriness that emanated from Jock’s bed, when he could not move. They were two of the worst cases, and they could only exchange greetings by shouting across the ward.

On this morning there was a terrible silence. No one had the heart for song or gramophone. Patterson’s pain was too apparent; the coming end of it held the men in a hushed suspense. Then suddenly Patterson made an effort and called to Jock, ‘How are you, Jock?’ And Jock, white with sympathy, called back, ‘Champion! What way are you, Patterson?’ The pity of it....

But Jock’s story is only a quarter written. Its chapters have been fine reading for those who have had the luck to read them so far, but I believe there will be finer chapters yet.

Often I said to myself in fear for him, ‘Whom the orderlies love die young’—for the orderlies adored Jock, but the adapted proverb did not come true, for he is walking about now and ‘enjoying life fine to make up for all the months in bed—not that I suffered so much at all, Nurse.’

This is a happy story, but we saw sad ones.

Death is just an incident in hospital life. Alas! one sometimes forgets that it is all-important to the dying. A household seems to hold its breath when somebody dies; a ward continues its automatic routine. There is pity—much of it—but it is a common-sense pity, that accepts death as just an inevitable happening to be finished and then forgotten.

I remember so well the night when old Sergeant Meadows died. He had only been in the ward for three days, so that his personality had had no chance to impress us. All the men settled down to sleep except Harman, who had suddenly gone mad. He shrieked if anyone went near him, tried to push us away, then to blow us away. A hypodermic of morphia seemed to produce little effect on him except that he was a shade quieter; he did not sleep but remained sitting up in bed, watchful and terribly alert.

Meanwhile the poor old sergeant was dying. Nothing could be done for him. Morton, the orderly, always pitiful, came and looked at him.

‘Well,’ he said philosophically, ‘this is a queer night we’re having. A man in the other ward tells me ’e’s been seein’ rabbits. It’s too much! I just says “This must stop. There’s too many seein’ rabbits to-night.” I knew a man what saw red, white, and blue rats—had ’em proper, ’e did.’

Morton sighed. He was a gentle soul, capable of infinite tenderness and patience, as many orderlies are. They are, one sometimes thinks, gentler than women, less conventional, and stereotyped in their kindness.

‘Poor man!’ Morton murmured. ‘A good old soul. It’s queer how little one thinks of it. When the young ones die it comes worse on one.’

A few minutes afterwards the sergeant was dead. Unused to death, I hardly realised it. At once preparations were made for his laying-out and subsequent removal. There is a routine about death as about birth. The immensity of the spiritual change is obscured by the methodical functions of material life. Yet death is the supreme adventure.

It seemed sad for the old man to have met this great adventure among strangers, to go forth silently, without tears or prayers or love from us who watched. Yet I think this quiet, unemotional passing is dignified. Very soon afterwards the orderlies came with a stretcher and the Union Jack for pall, and so the old man left us. His body went to the mortuary, and his soul—surely, ‘his soul goes marching on.’ And all the time the other men slept like weary children. Only Harman sat up, still awake and watchful in his terrible nervous tension.

Hospital is a world to itself, and those outside know little of it; so one often thought, when visitors expressed surprise that we all seemed cheerful. Of course we were not all cheerful or always cheerful. The cheerfulness of the Tommy is a composite thing. In part it is due to his youth and his character, and is in that sense natural; but it is in part his religion—in some cases his only real religion. To be cheerful is ‘to play the game’—that wonderful, indefinite, sacred ‘Game’ of the English, which demands the utmost of body and soul. Just sometimes a man who had become one’s friend would admit the bitterness of his heart, would say that he was ‘fed-up,’ only to laugh it off and ask the eternal riddle, ‘Where’s the good of grumbling?’ So we were really cheerful at most times, but I always thought the most cheerful time the hours between five o’clock and eight in the morning.

In a surgical ward dressings are begun between four and five o’clock, but the general stir is not till five. It was customary in many wards for Sisters and nurses to provide an early cup of tea for the patients, and the Jocks and a few others had porridge. This was the time of sing-songs. Torrey-Alexander hymns were sandwiched between such cheerful ditties as ‘What’s the Matter with Father?’ and ‘Hulloa! hulloa! Who’s your Lady Friend?’ Then of course we had the inevitable ‘Little Grey Home,’ and as surely ‘Michigan’ and ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling.’ Meantime the bed patients were washing and beds were being made. The men who could get up were the last to move. If the delay became insupportable, their more active companions would tip them on to the floor—I have seen the whole bedstead turned upside down. The men themselves were great bed-makers, and one could nearly always find someone to give a hand in quite professional style.

Yes, things were cheerful in the mornings, and informal too. If work was done early the Sisters and nurses had time for a private and hasty cup of coffee in one of the dug-outs, and there was time, too, for talk with the men, and always we had a cheery visit from the ‘night super,’ Sister L. As for the war—the very reason of our present estate—it was the subject least discussed. Sometimes one almost forgot that there was a war. Every private house worries and thinks more of war than any hospital ward does—or it seems so. There might be dark thoughts under all the trivial discussions, the little jokes, the conventional badinage that we carried on, but they did not appear.

At eight o’clock the day staff arrived and our night was over—always, I was a little sorry. There is a vague but eternal feud between ‘the day people and the night people.’ The night staff is ‘the cat’ for the day staff. Whatever is missing—spoons, mugs, dressings, instruments—the solution of the mystery is clear—‘it’s those night people.’ The day orderlies lay on the souls of the night nurses dozens of spoons, forks, and knives. The day Sister thinks the night Sister either too easy or too harsh with her patients. It is just one of the inevitables of life.

I shall think often now of those whose watch is by night—not with any pity, for it is a strange, quiet life, but a happy one. I only knew it in a rather dead season, not in the busy time when trains were coming in and patients arriving nightly. There the night staff has small time for reflection. The hours pass in a whirl of bed-baths, dressings, and settlement. But it was not my good fortune to know such nights.

‘Hallow-E’en.’

THE ROMANCE OF THE BARBER.

‘We’re much too early, John. I said we should be. There’s not a sign of a bass.’ I lifted the sail and peered across the shining water.

‘Nought’s lost by bein’ in time, sir,’ said the old boatman. ‘They’ll sport with the flood. And there be another boat over there. Mr. Harris and his little boy.’

‘He never misses these early tides,’ I said. ‘I suppose they just suit him. He can have his sport before he has to open his shop. He’s pretty venturesome to come out here by himself. But I suppose he knows the Bar as well as you sailor-men?’

‘He didn’t at one time, sir. He’d as soon have set himself down on a hot stove as come out here.’ And old John’s deep-set blue eyes twinkled. ‘What changed him? Well, it all had to do with his courtship, and getting of his wife. There’s a bit o’ ebb to run, and whilst I fixes they minnows I’ll tell ’ee about it. Just let me get at that locker fust. Thank ’ee, sir. That’s it.

‘Well, except that the good Lord had ordained his place in the world, and so he were bound to fill it, I dunno but what the most curious thing weren’t Mr. Harris coming to Appledore village at all, and living among us rough fisher-folk, for to all appearance he were as much out o’ place as a limpet in a garden rockery. And you’ll agree, sir, when you hears ’ow I fust became acquainted with him.

‘’Twas some while ago now, sir, and I’d a-been away from home, out foreign down along the coast o’ Cuba, and ’twas a wretched night when I sets foot once more on Appledore quay. Dark, and wet, and blowy. No one weren’t about, and the shops were all shut, and the street lamps had blowed out. The light from the barber’s shop at the far corner were the only cheerful thing in sight. When I gets to it, what should I see but a little, youngish, clean-faced, bald-headed man in his shirt-sleeves, and with a white apron on, and big gold spectacles, crouching against the wall, trying to shelter hisself from the wind and wet. He looks up in a queer, blinky way, and I stops.

‘“Why,” I says, “what’s this? Where’s old Puggy?”

‘“Mr. Pugstiles is dead,” pipes the little man, “and I’ve bought his business. And some young men have thrown me out o’ the shop,” and he coughs behind his ’and very genteel.

‘I opens the door. There was a dozen half-growed young chaps sprawling about the shop and roaring with laughing, and playing the fool. I never had no use for they scamps what hangs about the ferry and won’t go to sea, and I was going to put ’em out when the little man stops me.

‘“No, thank you,” he says very polite, “I would rather manage this alone.”

‘So, as he wouldn’t let me help ’im, I goes off home. And that, sir, were the fust time as ever I see Mr. Harris. I’ve known him a long time now, but I’ve never forgot my fust sight o’ him, crouching under the window, with the rain and wind beating down upon him.

‘He were small and weak, and his chest were bad. That was why he come away from London. His voice were peepy like a chicken calling the old hen. He didn’t drink, and he didn’t smoke, and he didn’t swear, and to say truth there was so many things against him, no one could say which was the wust. He were the fair butt o’ the place; even the women and girls derided him.

‘I was always a wanderer, and soon I goes off again, to Antwerp, and then away to Java. I were three good years older when next I landed on Appledore quay. ’Twas much such a night as t’other, cold and wet and blowy. But the light from the barber’s shop was shining out on the wet stones, and Mr. Harris, who I do believe I hadn’t thought on since I went away, comes into my mind again, all of a sudden.

‘“He’m gone. The place looks quiet enough now,” says I to myself. Then I shoves open the door.

‘’Tis a long, narrow room, with benches at the side. They benches were full o’ men sitting quiet waiting their turn. At the far end I see Mr. Harris shaving away like a good ’un, his bald head and his gold specs shining in the lamplight. I were so astonished I stood still without speaking. Then he says in the peepy little voice I remembered so well,

‘“I will ask one of you gentlemen kindly to shut that door, and keep it shut.”

‘And I’m blest if the most cantankerous chap in the place didn’t get up quite quiet, and shut it without a word. And then I went home.

‘Well, sir, I found Mr. Harris had got to be boss of the village. ’Twas the wonderfullest thing! He was the same little weak man I had fust seen, a surprised-looking creature with his big gold glasses, and his pale face, and his mouth half open, but lor bless you! the whole place bowed down to him. He were Secretary to the Regatta, and Churchwarden, and sang in the choir, and sometimes read the lessons, and when the Vicar put in they peal of bells, with the thing by which you can play times on ’em, it was Mr. Harris who played on ’em all his spare time, till some folks who lived near the church, and didn’t care for music, wished they bells further.

‘I saw what he was for myself a few days after I got home. Me and Tom Jenkyns was passing his shop one fine morning and Mr. Harris, in his white apron and gold specs, was on the quay peering about in the sun. Tom ain’t a beauty when he’s sober, which he weren’t then by no means, so I gets in between ’em. Mr. Harris looks up in his gentle way through his glasses.

‘“Dear me, Mr. Jenkyns,” he says, “I am sorry to see you with such a dirty chin! It wouldn’t do for you to meet a young lady with that chin! Oh, no. You’d better come inside,” and he ’as Tom in the shop and in the chair, and shaves him, and has ’im outside again, before Tom could think where to tell him to go to. Now that was a wonderful thing. Don’t ’ee think so, sir?’

‘Indeed I do,’ I said, for I knew Mr. Jenkyns pretty well. ‘How on earth did he manage him? How did he work it?’

‘You may well ask that, sir. But ’tis more easy asked than told. How did he do such things? None can say. He never lost his temper; he never raised his voice, he never laughed—not out loud. And he looked at you in that queer, wondering way. And then his manners, and his politeness! And he never give in to nobody.

‘Time went on, and he prospered. He was clever at his job, having the London tricks, and he went about attending on gentlemen’s houses. His ’ealth come back, and he got smarter and younger looking, and he wore a white collar and a white shirt every day, even under his apron. How ’e could abear they collars I can’t think. When my wife puts one on me I feels like a bird in a cage. But there, I s’pose it is all use. His white linen used to shine, and his eyes shine through his glasses. And he painted his ’ouse white, and put boxes of flowers in the windows. He rigged up a big red and white barber’s pole, and on Sundays he ’oisted the Jack on it. He did well, and we was proud of him.

‘And then, well then, just as everything was going so well, what do you think happened, sir?’

‘Perhaps I can guess,’ I said. ‘The ladies. They took a hand?’

‘They did, sir. They did. They’d looked on Mr. Harris all along with scorn, and troubled noth’en about him. Then all of a sudden it come to ’em how blind they’d been. And that here were a nice young man, for he were only a little over thirty, with collars and shirts and a business, and beautiful manners, and a white house with flowers in boxes, and all agoing begging. From that moment he hadn’t a single hour’s peace. They was all at him, though the old ’uns was the wust. They sent him things to eat, and tried to get him to convoy ’em back from church. Old Widow Paul were took ill on his door-step and had to be carried into the shop. Miss Belcher, she as married pore old Tom Cole after he ’ad broke his leg, attacked him on his business side, and sent him a parcel of combings to be made up. Me and a lot o’ chaps was there when they come, and all I can say is, if they was all out of her ’ead, she must have ’ad a scalp like a tortoise-shell cat.

‘But it was all o’ no use. Mr. Harris didn’t like any o’ them, maid or widow, and he kept away from ’em. He was well guarded too; always there were someone in his shop. And the old woman who kep’ house for him, her ’usband being in an ’ome for uncurables, helped to keep ’em off.

‘Well, sir, things jogged along quite comfortable like till a queer thing happened. Me and Jenkyns was in his shop one brisk morning, when Tom, who ’ad a drop o’ beer in him as usual, winks at me and says:

‘“You did ought to see my sister-in-law, Mr. Harris,” says he; “she’d be the very young lady for you!”

‘Mr. Harris was stropping a razor. He looks round in his queer blinky way, but instead o’ putting Tom down he says:

‘“And what might she be like, Mr. Jenkyns?”

‘“She’m the fust girl in these parts. She lives with her mother to Lundy Island. She can cook, and she’m house-wise; what’s more she’m a heaven-born laundress, and she’m big and dark with red cheeks and blue eyes, and her name is Mirandy,” says Tom all in a breath.

‘Mr. Harris listens with his ’ead on one side, and a funny look comes over his face and his eyes sparkles. Tom forgets hisself and spits on the floor, but instead o’ requesting him to leave the shop Mr. Harris only says,

‘“And does the young lady ever come over here, Mr. Jenkyns?”

‘“She does not,” says Tom; “she bides to home and ’elps her mother. Capt. Dark, who goes to Lundy every week with the mails, have many a time offered her a free pass on his lugger, but she wouldn’t accept.”

‘“But—but her affections?” says Mr. Harris presently very gently; “perhaps they are engaged? Such a young lady!”

‘“She ain’t got no chap, if that’s what you mean,” says Tom; “there ain’t none to Lundy. Last time I come away I thought ’twere a pity there weren’t no young feller to arm ’er up the rocks. She were as pretty as a picture, with the waves breaking all about her feet.”

‘“Sea King’s daughter,” says Mr. Harris to hisself. But I heered ’im.

‘“She knows about you,” Tom goes on. “I tells her in general conversation what a deal people think o’ you. ‘He must be a leader o’ men,’ says she. But there is a phottygraf o’ her to home. I’ll fetch ’un,” and with that he goes out and Mr. Harris has me in the chair, and shaves me. His ’and were shaking so I were glad to escape without bloodshed. Then Tom comes back, and hands over the photty. Mr. Harris looks at it, and drops the razor. He gets pinker and pinker, and smiles and laughs and sets it on a little shelf and gazes upon it. As he doesn’t speak we goes out quietly. Then I remembers I hasn’t paid for my shave. So I goes back just in time to hear ’im say:

‘“An arrow—an arrow from the blind god’s bow at last!”

‘I says nothing, but puts down my penny and comes away on tiptoe.

‘Well, sir, that puzzles me. And I asks my darter the school-mistress what he meant. All I can say is, sir, if that little god as she telled me of did shoot one o’ his arrows at Mr. Harris, he must ha’ got him right in the wes’cot. For from that moment he were a changed man.

‘He were properly in love and no mistake! He worn’t a bit ashamed o’ it. He went about smiling and blushing, and very proud. The news soon got abroad, and the girls, some jeered, some laughed. Things moved along quickly. Letters passes between ’em. He ’ad his picture took, smiling, in a long black coat and a flower in his button-hole and a book in his ’and. He sends over bottles o’ scent and sweet soaps and such truck from his shop. Then, one beautiful morning in the beginning o’ October, he dresses hisself very smart, with a white wes’cot and shiny boots and new straw hat, and embarks on Dark’s lugger to go to Lundy to call on his young lady.

‘Now, living as he did on the quay, no one ’adn’t partic’ly noticed that Mr. Harris never went on the watter. Still Dark were surprised when he tells him he ’ad never yet crossed Appledore Bar. There was no wind, and Dark drops down with the ebb to the Bar, just about where we be now, and then all of a sudden Mr. Harris begins to be sea-sick. Dark carries many passengers, and ’tis a queer bit o’ watter ’twixt here and Lundy, but he says he never see anyone so bad as Mr. Harris was that day. It fair tore the inside out o’ him. He gets in such a state that Dark, seeing the job would be a long ’un for want o’ wind, puts him in his dinghy and lands him on the golf-links. Mr. Harris crawls into one o’ they bunker things and there he lay, and I did ’ear that the gentlemen played their golf right on top o’ him afore he could move. In the evening he creeps back home and goes to bed.’

‘Poor Mr. Harris!’ I broke in, ‘that was rough luck. How did he take it?’

‘Well, he didn’t give in, sir. Twice more he tried, but he never even got to the Bar. The second time they had to call the doctor to him. The doctor says his heart were weak, and it were very onwise to put such a strain on it, and he mustn’t try them tricks again. Then the doctor puts a mustard plaster to him, and goes away.

‘After that no one would take him. Steamers from ’Coombe had stopped running or ’e might ha’ gone by them. He felt hisself beaten, and his pride were broken. ’Twas a melancholly affair altogether. He thought he ’ad made a fool o’ hisself, though how a man can be stronger than his stomach I can’t see.

‘And the wust o’ all was to come. Mirandy thought she were a laughing-stock, and wouldn’t help. She wouldn’t come to him. If he wanted her, ’e must fetch her. She wouldn’t leave Lundy by herself for any man, so she said. And everyone were laughing, and talking, and taking sides.

‘He goes about neat and particular as usual, but the life and sparkle had gone out o’ him. He were looked up to, and had ’is business and his nice house, but he didn’t want ’em. He wanted Mirandy by his fireside, and her ’and in his.

‘Late one evening I was on Look-out Hill, when I hears a footstep and sees Mr. Harris. He stands staring out to sea, and presently up pops Lundy Light and twinks and goes out, and pops up and twinks and goes out again.

‘“When I sees that light,” says Mr. Harris at last, “I thinks she is beckoning me”; and from the sound o’ his voice I guessed he were near crying.

‘“It is not the fust time a queasy stomach have kept loving hearts apart,” says I, wishing to comfort him.

‘“Love against stomach,” he says very bitter, and walks away without saying good night.

‘The fine weather held well into October that year, sir; then one night there come the wust blow known in these parts. It blew hurricane hard from the nor’-west on a big spring flood. The watter come right up the streets and flooded the houses. The whole place were in an uproar. And to make things wuss, about midnight, when the storm were at its height, the lifeboat rocket was fired. A big ship were ashore on Lundy.’

‘I heard of that gale,’ I said; ‘a barge was put over the sea-wall at Instow.’

‘That’s right, sir. Well, you knows the rule about the lifeboat, fust come fust served. They that gets there fust goes. I grabs my oilies and runs. Me and Tom Jenkyns get there amongst the fust. Old Batten, the cox’un, gives us our cork jackets. ’Twas pitchy dark. There was no lights but the hurricane lamps and rope flares, and they kept blowing out. You couldn’t hear yourself speak for the wind and watter. What was done were done dumb show, and the boys and people all yelling and shouting.

‘We mans the boat. She was on her cradle and Batten were just giving the word to let go, when who should come shoving and pushing through the crowd but Mr. Harris. Tom and me was in the bows, and he spies us and clasps his ’ands.

‘“Take me, take me,” he cries, and stretches up to us.

‘Someone gives him a hoist up, and I grabs him, and pulls him in. I don’t think Cap’n Batten see’d him till it were too late, what with the wind and watter and blowing about of the lights, and general confusion. And at that very moment the boat goes down the ways like a rocket, and if Mr. Harris ’ad been half a minute later she’d ha’ been over him. And that would have been the end o’ his troubles for good and all.

‘He crawls under our seat and lays down. He had got on a little thin overcoat over his other clothes, but nothing to be no good. I throws down a spare jersey, and Tom a oilskin. Then I tosses him a bottle o’ tea and brandy as my missis always gives me.

‘“You’ve done it this time!” I yells. “You must fend for yourself now. I can’t help you.”

‘We drops down the river, for the tide was ebbing strong. And then I realises what the weight o’ wind was. I’ve see’d some queer seas in my time, but never a wuss bit o’ watter than the Bar here was that night, smooth as oil though it be now. The great wind met the great tide, and raised a hurricane sea; the boat herself couldn’t ha’ faced it if the wind hadn’t just then hauled a couple o’ points, and let us get a bit o’ sail on her. Even then I didn’t know half the time whether I were right side or wrong side up. Cold, wet, and rough work it were. But at last we gets over and away and shapes a course for Lundy.

‘Before long the wind takes off a bit, and the sea begins to moderate. ’Twas a queer blow altogether. Not a drop o’ rain to it, and all the wind’ard side o’ the hedges were crisp and black as if fire had burned ’em. Then the sky cleared and the day broke. There were the barque ashore on the Hen and Chickens Rocks, north end o’ the island. Two boats was standing by her, the Braunton and ’Coombe boats; so we rows along to the landing-place, which were sheltered, and brings up. And then me and Tom bends down and fishes up Mr. Harris.

‘You recollect, sir, he ’ad been rolling about in the watter in the bottom of the boat the better part o’ the night. I never see such a melancholly sight! He ’ad no hat, one shoe were gone, his shirt and wes’cot were half tored off. And the queasiness—! But never mind that! His gold glasses were smashed, and he ’ad a great bleeding cut over one eye from the bottle o’ tea and brandy, which had broke. I judged him pretty near gone; he were cold as a stone, and half drowned.

‘We turns to, and gives him a rub, and shoves a warm jersey on him, and Cap’n Batten, without making no remark, shoves down a bottle to us, o’ brandy. That pulls him round a bit. He looks about him and points to the island. We nods, and he slips down again.

‘Just then a boat puts off, and when she gets alongside I see Mirandy was in her. She looks as pretty as a picture, with her red cap and red cheeks, and blue eyes all of a sparkle. One o’ our chaps clears his throat and coughs, and then another till all the boat were doing it. And even Cap’n Batten, though he were high up in the Wesleyans, and ’ad ninety-eight grandchildren, winks at her.

‘Then she says, looking up very demure, and trying not to laugh:

‘“If you please, Cap’n Batten, is my brother-in-law Tom Jenkyns in the boat? And if he is may he come ashore? Mother wants to see him.”

‘“He be aboard, my dear,” says Cap’n Batten, “but I can’t let no one leave the boat. We been out all night, and we’m for home now. But you can give ’un a message. He’m down there forrard.”

‘The boat comes down and she gives the message, and then Tom says,

‘“We got something nice for you, Miry.”

‘“For me?” says Mirandy, shaking her curls. “What can that be?”

‘“We’ve brought your young man. He’m come to fetch you after all,” says Tom.

‘We pokes up Mr. Harris from the bottom of the boat, and then, sir, they two has their fust look at one another.’

‘By Jove, John!’ I said, ‘that must have been a moment! What happened?’

‘I never see’d anybody’s face, man or woman, change like Miry’s did, sir. What she had expected him to be like I don’t know; but not what he was like then, I be sure. And fust one o’ us laughs, and then another, till the boat’s crew were busting their sides. Mr. Harris draws hisself together, and looks at us in that blinky, half-puzzled way, and fust one chap looks shamed and stops, and then another, till there was silence. Then he looks down again at Mirandy, and she laughs and gets red, and a funny look, pitiful like, comes into her face, and she gets scarlet red, and stretches out her arms. We lifts him down, and she helps ’im into her boat, and she wipes the blood from his face, and he puts his arm round her, for I reckon he’d ’ad about enough o’ it. Then the boy rows them ashore, and we watches her ’elping him up the rocks, till we loses sight o’ them. And then, sir, we sets sail for home.

‘And that be the way, sir, that Mr. Harris come to Lundy Island for his wife. And I reckon he deserved her! Don’t you think so, sir?’

‘He did,’ I said warmly, ‘if ever a man did. Many a man has dared a lot for the sake of a girl, but I think Mr. Harris has earned a place among the bravest of them. He might well have died that night, and he must have known the lifeboat wouldn’t put back for him.’

‘Yes, sir. He did, o’ course. It were kill or cure, and he knowed it. I reckon he felt ’twere the only way to get there, so there it was! But ’twas all right. He stayed to Lundy, and Parson Heaven, who owned the island then, married them. And that’s the way Mr. Harris got his bride, sir.’

‘But hold on,’ I said; ‘that’s not all the yarn. How did he get back again?’

‘I’ll tell you how he brought her ’ome, sir, if you pleases. The tide and the yarn will about finish together.

‘Well, the fame o’ Mr. Harris soon spread abroad, and all were anxious to welcome him ’ome. The women forgave him, and spoke well o’ him, and were pleased he ’ad got Miry for his wife at last. The day Dark went over, chartered special, to fetch the happy pair home, Appledore were fair a-buzz. Dark, he puts a new suit o’ sails on the lugger, and when he gets to Lundy and ships Mr. and Mrs. Harris he rigs up every bit o’ bunting he can lay hands on. And home he comes booming with a nice soft breeze. Seventeen o’ our ketches and two small barques was on the Bar that evening, waiting for the tide, and when they see the lugger coming, all dressed and glorious, they cheers, and gives her the road, and falls in behind. Then the lugger reaches the sand-barges, and they cheers and falls in behind too. And further up the river she finds the town band on a barge, and the little rowing and sailing boats all come out to shout and welcome the bride and bridegroom home.

‘So up they comes. Up the river with a swingeing flood tide, and a fair breeze and a bright sky, and all shining and sparkling. The old walls and slips and yards was crowded, and everyone cheered and waved. The Vicar he started the bells, and hoists the flag on the church tower. ’Twas a grand and wonderful sight.

‘Fust comes the lugger, with Dark and his mate keeping well out o’ sight, and Mr. and Mrs. Harris standing well forrard so that all might see. And as they come Mr. Harris takes off his tall hat and bows and waves, this way and that way, while his bald head and new glasses shines in the sun. And Mrs. Harris, who ’ad got her wedding clothes sent over from ’Coombe, furls her white parasol, and bows that way and this way, very dignified, from the hips like. Then comes the band a-banging away, and then the little row-boats and sailing boats, and then the barges and ketches and trawlers, and two barques, and all shouting and cheering. And what was best o’ all, sir,’ said old John, tapping my knee in his earnestness, ‘there were no nasty steamers with their smeech and noise. ’Twas all good sails, sweet and pleasant.

‘Well, Dark brings to, and drops anchor off the quay. Cap’n Batten goes off with his gig, me bein’ one o’ the crew. We brings Mr. and Mrs. Harris ashore, and they lands on the quay. The mob form a lane, and Mr. Harris leads his wife along it. Outside his ’ouse he stops, and waves his ’at again, and bows and smiles, and then puts his arm round Mrs. Harris and kisses her afore everyone. Then he opens the door, and takes her in, and shuts it.

‘And that, sir, is how Mr. Harris brought his wife to Appledore.’

The old man paused and sighed. ‘It were a brave sight,’ he said. ‘Mr. Harris is up for the Council now. He says ’twill be the proudest day o’ his life if he gets put in. H’m wrong there. His proudest day were when he brought his wife home to Appledore.’

‘But what about the queasiness coming home?’ I demanded, ‘and why didn’t⸺’ but my questions were only partially asked. A shiver came over the shining water; a myriad trickles and rivulets spread themselves over the great mass of sand that lay exposed to our right hand. The tide had turned.

‘Get your rod, sir; they won’t be long now. Watch the gulls! The queasiness? Oh, that never come back. The doing in the lifeboat were kill or cure, and it cured him. Anyway, he never ’ad no more o’ it. He—but look there, sir! There’s the bass. My yarn’s spun just in time.’

I flicked the blue-and-white minnow free of the rod. Old John knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and grasped the oars. For the rest of the morning Perca Labrax held the stage.

W. H. Adams.

SIGNS AND NOTICES ON THE WESTERN FRONT.

BY F. J. SALMON.

From the military landing officer’s placard, telling you where to report and what to do, which faces you on the quay before landing in France, to the stencilled board informing you that the recently captured portion of German trench you are standing in was called ‘Stellung 19,’ the ‘Front’ is plastered with notices and signs of every description.

Some are bald official orders of little interest, others are full of meaning and sometimes bring the grim realities of war home to one more than any other feature of the landscape, and yet others—the unofficial ones—are full of humour and eloquent of the cheerful spirit which comes uppermost in the British soldier, be his surroundings ever so miserable.

The most conspicuous ones are those that are intended to be seen by the swiftly passing motor-car—Speed Limit X Miles Per Hour,—Go Slow Past The Column,—Aerodrome, Dead Slow To Avoid Dust Spoiling The Engines.

It is regrettable that sufficient notice is not always taken of such injunctions and those who are affected often have recourse to other tactics. Some are frankly threatening: Drivers’ Numbers Taken And Reported To The A.P.M. Others appeal to our better feelings—the notice is put in the form of a request, and a large Thank You at the end of the restricted stretch shames the scorcher who has kept his foot on the throttle. Others again resort to subterfuges, such as Mind The Bump! There is, of course, no bump, but by the time the driver has found this out and got up his speed again the column of lorries, or whatever it may have been by the roadside, is passed.

In addition to the military road restrictions there are still, of course, the curious mystic signs of the French Auto Club—the grid showing the level crossing gate, the cross for the cross roads and the V or Z for single or double corners.

In order not to make things too easy for the Hun agent most units do not label their billets or transport with their full title, but adopt certain devices and signs which are allotted to them. These assume the form of flowers, animals, or geometric designs of every conceivable pattern and colour. They are to be seen everywhere—few people know what they mean and the spy who would sort out the signs and the units they represent has an unenviable job.

In some cases, however, where secrecy does not appear to be necessary, appropriate emblems are used. I remember one day my car broke down opposite a column of lorries belonging to an Australian unit. On the side and back of each of these vehicles was painted a white kangaroo.

My Scottish Sergeant-Major, though a fervent admirer of the gallant colonials, could not resist a gentle leg-pull. With an air of ignorant innocence he went up to a group of men and asked them what on earth they painted pictures of mice all over their lorries for! He affected to be immensely interested in their explanation.

As one approaches the front there are signs and directions innumerable—the arrows and flags showing the way to casualty clearing stations, signposts of all kinds showing the way to dumps, divisional baths, watering places for horses, canteens, headquarters, field cashiers, the local cinema show, or the Y.M.C.A. hut.

It is in the villages where the troops nearest the line are billeted that the greatest variety of amusing inscriptions is to be found. At a badly strafed cross roads in a certain village there is a small round shell hole, not unlike a booking office, in the wall of a house. Above it are the words: Blighty Corner—Book Here! It was in the same village that the Xth Siege Battery had the whole side of their mess knocked out—you could drive a gun team through the hole where the door had been. On a bit of remaining wall are the words: Don’t Stand Out There Knocking—Come Right In!

The streets are often labelled with names which at once give evidence as to the present or late occupants of the billets in them—Piccadilly, Prince’s Street, Black Watch Street, Quebec Street, Springbok Laager.

The French names have, however, often been retained, and everywhere, for the benefit of the civilian population, one sees the warning—Taisez Vous, Méfiez Vous—Les Oreilles Ennemies Vous Écoutent. In more than one French office this notice is decorated with amusing pictures of Huns with huge ears listening from round corners.

In one place it has been possible to devise a bi-lingual notice—

Danger pay Attention	to the	Trains.
	aux

A ‘poilu,’ who had come back to his village near the firing line on ‘permission’ and who wished to indulge in a little quiet gardening in the diminutive plot behind his cottage, was confronted with a large notice—Danger—Blind Shell. His wife had to explain to him that a German 8-inch ‘dud’ had buried itself there. Being one whose duties lie on the lines of communication, he had not acquired that contempt for the unexploded shell which the ‘Bairnsfather’ Tommy has and so the garden was left severely alone!

The position of this good French soldier is worthy of remark. He was a farrier at some way back supply depot and, in his whole life, had not heard a shot fired in anger. It was only when he came home on leave that he experienced the thrills of being under shell fire, and it was from his women folk that he had to learn the precise moment when he could decently retire to the cellar without an undue display of timidity! Ye Gods! What a leave! We may well be thankful if we get nothing more alarming than a Zeppelin raid when doing our week in town!

The French villagers who sell groceries, eggs, wine, or ‘Anglish Beere’ in the many half-ruined shops in the shelled area advertise their goods often with notices in the weirdest of Anglo-French spelling, and it is extraordinary in what surroundings some of them manage to carry on business.

I know of one little ‘épicerie’ which does a roaring trade in a house that has no roof and practically only three walls. The place has been made more or less weatherproof with some pieces of tin and a few planks. The rest of the village has been smashed to pieces. The neighbourhood is shelled almost daily, and whenever I pass I look, not without anxiety, to see if the plucky old lady’s sign is still there.

At the ruined railway station of a certain town near the line the notice—‘Billets’—still stands over the shattered booking office, and, sure enough, if you hunt around among the débris you will find tickets to Charing Cross! At another station a few miles away and also within sight of the German trenches the door labelled—‘Sortie’—is barred with wreckage and is about the only part of the building you can not walk in and out of at will!

Not very far away some of my own unit were once billeted in part of what was once a French Barracks, and it was here that I was shown some inscriptions of quite historical interest.

On the ground floor the walls bear the initials and names of ‘regular,’ ‘terrier,’ and K.’s army, together with those of many a French poilu. The top storey has been smashed in by a 15-centimetre shell, but the stonework round the windows remains, and there, cut in the limestone, are to be found records of British soldiers who had tenanted those rooms under very different circumstances! J. Jemison, Prisoner of War—Taken August 1806—Alderson—Ellis—Wheatley P. of W. 1806, 07, 08, 09, 10. Rather a long spell! but, knowing our French friends as we do now, we can be sure their imprisonment was not wholly unpleasant.

Some of the most incongruous of signs are the ordinary hand-posts at cross roads indicating the way to places over ‘the other side.’ I seldom pass one of these plain iron signs without thinking of the strange contrast between the life now and that of three years ago. An arrow points towards a straight white road leading over the hill—Bapaume X Kilomètres. Not so very far either and yet no man on earth could get there!—though a whole army can, and will in time. Over the crest the smooth surface is cut by innumerable trenches and barred with wire entanglements. Even here, at the cross roads, though well out of view, it is unwise to linger—the Huns have a machine-gun trained down the road and open indirect fire at intervals.

On first coming to the front it is curious to see an immortal name like Neuve Chapelle displayed on an ordinary everyday signpost—what would an American souvenir hunter give for such a relic!

When travelling towards the line, as you begin to get near things the type of traffic notice alters. Motorists are no longer asked to ‘mind the bump’ nor horsemen to ‘keep off the crops.’ Road Closed to all but Single Vehicles or Infantry in Small Parties shows that it is unwise to attract the attention of the German observation balloon opposite. Then you may come to a sentry with a red flag who stops you and points to a large placard—VEHICLES 4 MILES AN HOUR. Dust must not be Raised. The Hun has probably got a gun or two laid on this bit of road and his observer is watching patiently for a tell-tale wisp of dust! After this it will probably not be very long before you have to get out and walk. Road under Enemy Observation—No Traffic of any Kind Beyond this Point During Daylight Hours.

There will be another sentry here and he will show you the way to the communication trench unless your work is of some special nature and you have a pass that entitles you to walk on and risk it.

As soon as the trench zone is reached notices and signboards are more frequent than ever. In addition to our own direction posts and trench names there are also, frequently, relics of the French occupation. Vers le Front, Vers l’Arrière, or the names of communication and fire trenches, such as Boyau Rideau, Tranchée Illot.

Again as we approach the firing line the remarks of the wag and the humorist are more frequent. In one place there is a board with a finger pointing to a peculiarly unhealthy sap and inscribed—To The War! A frequently shelled trench junction bears the legend—Don’t Stand About Here—There’s A War On!

The signpost To Berlin is of course common—or was.

Many of the dug-outs bear fantastic names and, in addition to notices giving the designation of those who occupy them, often have other inscriptions, hospitable or otherwise, such as Dew Drop Inn or No Room Here. Those with a double entrance sometimes display the most fearful threats to those who would attempt to go in by the ‘out’ passage, whereas some such remark as The Only Way is inscribed over the correct entrance.

It must be remarked, however, that any apparent inhospitality is usually in the interests of the service—the nearer one gets to the front line the more hospitable are the Messes.

The mural decorations of the dug-outs are also worthy of more than superficial notice, as they often reflect the interests or character of the occupants. The pretty faces of ‘Harrison Fisher,’ ‘Philip Boileau,’ and other girls smile at one from the walls of many of these abodes, and Bairnsfather pictures caricaturing the very scenes of the life going on outside are to be seen everywhere. Grim pictures of the war from the pen of Matania and other artists may be found in the dug-outs of some of the more serious-minded, while others show their hankering after yachting, shooting, or racing. A total of many thousands of square feet of wall space must be taken up by cuttings from the ‘Vie Parisienne,’ and in many cases, more especially in the French lines, the occupant himself has been responsible for the pictures and designs in his quarters.

The enemy, too, has his notice boards, and some of them are written and stuck up on the parapet for our benefit or otherwise. Insulting remarks are not infrequently displayed in this way. Sometimes he brags about some big gun he is bringing up to shell our back billets with, sometimes we are told that he is quite ready for our attack on such and such a date—information which is usually incorrect. The German notice with which continental travellers were, perhaps, most familiar before the war is conspicuous by its absence—Nicht Hinauslehnen; it would, however, be a most appropriate warning for visitors to the trenches!

On captured ground some of the German notices and signs still remain, but many have been replaced. A spot which had once been used by the Germans as a dump for stores is now labelled—Fritz’s Dump—Under Entirely New Management!

Those who have their being in the observation posts are particularly shy of visitors and—No Admittance—placards of all descriptions greet one at their entrances. In this the observers show their wisdom, for the inexperienced may unwittingly give away the position to the enemy.

It is not always necessary to show oneself to do this. A few puffs of smoke from a pipe, or the use of a telescope without a protecting cowl to keep the sun from reflecting in it, may bring about destruction. I remember a careless Hun drawing attention to an otherwise well concealed post by flourishing an unshaded telescope in the sunlight!

A comic relief to a scene of havoc and destruction in an observation post was once presented to me by a portion of a printed notice giving instructions as to what observers were to look out for and report. The post had been spotted, and after the expenditure of many rounds, the enemy had at last obtained a direct hit. Crawling in through the débris to report the damage, I was confronted by a broken beam to which item 2 of the notice was still adhering—What Are The German Guns Firing At? Would that the answer had been less easy to guess!

IN SALONICA: KING CONSTANTINE’S FÊTE.

The last day but one! It was my first waking thought. The hot June sun, streaming in from the windows facing the beech-crowned summit of Mount Kotos, which rose above the bare lower downs, warned me it was time to be gone. The wise storks and swallows had already started on their long summer flight; it was time to be following the birds North, as the Thraki was to sail next day.

It was a fascinating place I was leaving, this city on the outer wave of the whirlpool. Salonica had proved unexpectedly interesting, with its little known treasures of art and archæology, and its strange old medley of East and West now further complicated by a new Frankish crusade.

Here were the same mixed feelings of admiration and contempt as at Byzantium, when the kings and knights of Western Chivalry camped for the first time without the walls. Here, too, surprised and equally unwilling hosts watched the foreign soldiery ride clattering through their streets. Here were the same alarums and excursions, the same continual vague, political intrigues, and at the back of it all the same real indifference as to whether French, German, or Russian finally won the Holy Shrine,—or what would seem more likely now, Franco-Spanish Jews.

Each day brought some novel turn of the wheel of Greco-German affairs or some fresh discovery in my exploration of the old Byzantine city on the hill. The summer sun, which woke me up betimes, left me lazily counting one by one, through the mist of my mosquito net, the tall white minarets of the town. Delicate, slender shafts holding the Muezzin’s gallery high in the air, they rose on terrace above terrace to the last broken spire, near where the brown brick towers of the Heptapyrgeion stood out clear-cut against the sky.

These minarets, with their finely-contrasting cypress trees, are numerous at Salonica, for the Turks invariably added one when they altered a church into a mosque. The Greek king did well to leave them standing when he took back the town from the Moslems. Apart from their picturesque beauty, the minarets still serve a useful purpose; for guide books leave one in Old Greece, they are not to be had at Salonica. Should your way lie down the tram-ridden Boulevard Reine Olga, where the roses in the villa gardens are powdered thick with dust, the public will direct you proudly. Or they will cheerfully point out the Rue Venizelos, and even follow you up the dim Turkish Bazaar at its end, urging you to buy from their various eager friends as you pass. Beyond that, across the Roman Via Egnatia, which cuts the town in half, nobody seems to know what happens, nor should a well-brought-up Salonican wish to go.

But the minarets beckon; they prove the best of guides. Their white spires give a sure clue to the whereabouts of the ancient mosques and churches. And here, through my window, I could count most of these landmarks by which I steered. Nearest and tallest rose the minaret of Sancta Sophia, Holy Wisdom, the cathedral church of the Metropolitan.

During the ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter great crowds had gathered here. Good Friday was the day of the people’s procession. The peasants from the scattered villages brightened the town with the cheerful reds and blues of their national costumes, and at night all the world walked singing solemn chants, following the bishops in their glittering copes and jewelled mitres and the simple flower-arched bier.

Easter Eve proved to be the official festival of the Greek army and government. A dense mass of people filled the church and surged confusedly in the darkness of the open square outside it; each man, woman, and child, holding an unlit candle in their hands—some large, some small—painted with holy symbols and flowers; careful souls, mindful of their gala clothes, taking pains to hold their candle gingerly by its long cotton wick.

Within the building the deep gloom was hardly broken by the lights at the two lecterns, at which the laity read by turns, and the glimmer from where behind the icon-screen came the murmur of priests intoning. After what felt an interminable period of waiting, it was midnight. ‘Christ is risen,’ came the cry. The heavy gold embroidered curtain rose, disclosing within the sanctuary the long, low Altar of the Last Supper. Out poured a brilliant procession of ecclesiastics, marching down the nave to take their stand on the platform in the outer court; everyone in the crowd lighting his candle from his neighbour’s as the cortège passed along. In a moment the church was bright from end to end. The massive pillars stood like rocks in a waving flickering sea of gold. Then, for the first time, the great Madonna of the apse shone revealed. Enthroned on high, against the hollow, glowing background of mosaic, She held out Her Son to bless a strange assemblage under the dome, where British and French officers stood with their Greek comrades, headed by the Greek General Commanding, and all his staff, each holding a lighted taper in honour of His resurrection.

What a night for the German aircraft, suddenly flashed across our minds! In the very street outside, now lit with a thousand lights and packed with human beings, I had seen their ugly work only a few weeks before. I shuddered as we forged our way home.

Up the hill directly above Sancta Sophia, the somewhat stumpy minaret of St. Paraskevi reared its head. This grand fourth-century basilica, finer than any building of its kind at Constantinople, is now given over to the Greek refugees from Asia Minor. Their carpets and piteous coloured rags hang in complete disorder from its high wooden galleries.

The platform for the Mihrab, facing towards Mecca, remains aslant the apse; although a tiny altar at its northern end claims the church back for its Christian builders—an altar so small and poor, adorned by such dim, feeble lights, I hardly noticed it at first the day I found my way in there. Here were no crowds, no pomp of a church militant, only the begging children who trotted in my wake. The place appeared empty except for a solitary peasant woman, bowed in prayer before the icon on the little shrine, praying, no doubt, for a safe return to her distant home in Syria—her dress proclaimed how far the wars had driven her. She stood there, a strange impassive figure in her full dark purple trousers and dull red veil, silhouetted sharply against the cream plaster walls and the cipollino columns brown with age and dirt. A faint blue smoke curled from under the unseen cooking-pots in the gallery behind her, blurring the light from the large windows and drifting out across the wide open space. Through it, the arches of the nave and triforium gleamed with the rose and gold and green of their splendid floral mosaics.

Two more great churches the minarets pointed out. St. Demetrius, dedicated to the City’s patron saint, is a basilica not unlike that of the refugees. The mosaics here have a curious silvery sheen, but the marbles are the church’s special glory. By some piece of good fortune the original Byzantine casing of the walls is almost intact. Remembering how this much coveted city has suffered, how, time after time, it has been besieged, burnt, sacked—for it stands where two famous highways cross, from Rome to Byzantium, from Vienna to the Aegean and the East—it is little short of marvellous that any fine old buildings are left; still more so that these treasures should have escaped the general doom of such things. A wonderful mellow tone pervades the great interior, where the one spot of brilliant colour is the gold flag of the Double Empire, which holds the eagles of the East and West aloft.

Alas, that modern Greece should have St. Demetrius in its clutches! The Turks at least left the marbles much as they found them. The Greeks have written their recent triumph in huge black letters right across the apse; October 1912—there is no escaping that or the monstrous Austrian stove—another claimant for the double eagles, which stretches its ugly arms over the nave.

St. Demetrius, as is only right, was used to shelter soldiers rather than refugee civilians. Sketching there I often wondered why so many Greeks in khaki wandered in and out. Very devout people, I thought, though their casual lounge and bored air rather belied them. Anyway, I decided, they cannot all be former sacristans on leave. To Frenchmen of every rank I soon grew accustomed; the blue field uniform was invariably to be seen admiring, drawing, or measuring, each time I went there. Even a British officer strayed in at times, some odd, adventurous spirit who cared for such things—unlike his kind. But why all these shabby Greek Tommies?

One afternoon in the gathering dusk when it grew too dark to work and I was exploring the empty upper galleries, to my astonishment I nearly fell over a sick man. Startled and peering down I saw it was a soldier curled up on his blanket bed. A comrade was hastening to him bringing a pannikin full of water, his footsteps echoing down the long gallery behind me. I beat a hurried retreat, noticing as I did so the kit and beds of a whole company, neatly rolled up for the day, lying in the shadow of the low marble railing. But this was in May; since then there are fewer Royalist troops tucked away in the heart of Salonica.

The furthermost great church—my favourite among all those the minarets showed me—was the round fortresslike St. George, built in the third century. It stands near the Arch of Galerius—the Roman arch of triumph now resounding to the clang of the British army motor-lorries. From its massive strength and air of grave simplicity, it might be one of the towers guarding the eastern wall of the town. No columns interrupt the view within, and on the majestic dome, whose sweep leaves everything clear, is the greatest monument in mosaic handed down from antiquity. It represents a succession of saints, none later than the time of the Emperor Constantine, who gaze pityingly down from the bronze and gold Portals of the Heavenly City. The tall figures are just stiffening from the grace and truth of the classic masters into the cramped outlines of the monkish artists, who feared to study the human form lest their models turned to wicked, tempting demons, all claws and teeth and tail, under their very eyes. The Turks were even more prejudiced on the subject, and defaced figures wherever met, no matter how many robes they wore. But the charm of the whole is quite unspoilt; it lies in the background.

The designer’s naïf joy in a fresh architectural expression shines from this Byzantine Paradise of Revelations. It radiates from these walls whose foundations were Jasper, Sardonyx, and Emerald—Chalcedony from the Macedonian peninsula our troops now hold—and all the other stones whose names are songs, from these arches springing one above another, these shell-ribbed cupolas and alcoves, these vistas of limitless arcades, where storks stand sentinel and peacocks spread their jewelled tails, coloured like cornflowers in grass.

On the low vaulting of the surrounding chapels, hollowed out in the twenty foot thick fortress wall, humble local birds find a place. Ducks and quails, cranes and smaller wild fowl from the Vardar marshes cover the diapered gold ground. Under the Osmanli rule these chapels were reserved for the different companies of the Sultan’s Regiment of Guards, hence the church’s Moslem name—Orta Sultan Osman Djami.

Last to be discovered at Salonica are the few Byzantine churches so small and insignificant they were never claimed by the Turks. No minarets point these out. But they are well worth finding for their splendid carved and painted screens.

Backwards and forwards the churches’ fate has swung. Bullet holes pit their soaring spires, witness to the most recent changes. Feast days and Holy days abound in this town of many faiths. Perhaps the prettiest among them is the Feast of Bairam, when the minarets that remain in the hands of the Moslems twinkle with rows of little lights. Then from my window I could see just how many mosques were left; each one marked by a tall fairy candle, burning steadily on the blue darkness of the hill.

‘Signora, wake, make haste, your Excellency’s boat leaves to-day at noon!’

My reverie over the old town came to an abrupt stop. If this were true, it was useless trying to decide where among all my favourite haunts I would sketch for the last time.

Eudocia, the good-natured Greek-Italian maid, making a noisy entry with my coffee, brought the surprising, unwelcome news.

‘But the Thraki doesn’t sail until Saturday!’ I protested. ‘Are you sure?’

Yes, she was positive. Had not Anastasie, the porter, told her this moment, having got it casually from the haughty-looking Greek Staff Colonel as he flicked imaginary dust off his boots after his early morning ride?

Well, I could not see V. again, or even let him know I was going; that much was certain. But there was only one thing to be done, and with a sinking heart I started to finish packing as rapidly as I could. In the middle of it I remembered I must rush off to the bankers who acted as my Salonican ‘Cook’; the day before, when I had tried to see them, having been one of the numerous fête days, when banks and shops were shut.

In the end there was too much to be done: I had to give up the chase. The Thraki beat me, though not before I had boarded her—luggageless. One peep into the tiny den I was to have slept in made me thankful enough to see her start. The Syria, ‘le bateau de luxe’ her agents proudly called her (that is the one Greek ship whose decks were ever known to be washed), was to sail on Monday; I should see V. again to say good-bye. All appeared to be for the best.

He rode in that evening nothing doubting, bringing me wild Madonna lilies, with sharp-pointed petals, from the hills above Kerech-Koi; how sad to have missed them and him.

The next day, the day my ship was to have sailed, the town was again en fête. It was more than a question of shutting the banks and shops; this time the whole place was gay with pale blue and white bunting for the festival of King Constantine, Bulgaroctonos (Slayer of Bulgars)—an old title of the Greek Emperors somewhat too hastily revived. St. Sophia was to be the scene of another official service, one of triumph at past victories over the King’s present friends.

Rather a tactless subject for so much rejoicing, I could not help thinking, as I heard the Greeks of the hotel going gaily out. But, then, in the Balkans people’s politics change rapidly and irony falls flat.

That day things were to move even faster than usual. The service, if it was held, must have been short. It seemed only a moment before the officials were back. It was a very crestfallen little party I met on my way downstairs. The swords of the Staff Colonel and his smart friends clanked dolefully up the marble steps. The civilians, in their ceremonial evening dress and top hats, looked as if they had been to a ball the night before which had rather disagreed with them. I missed the Railway Controller, a delicate little man with birdlike eyes and walk and a monstrous moustache, who had so far successfully dodged all our demands to open the new line connecting Salonica with Athens. But his confrère, the Censor, was there, quite shorn of his heavy importance. Even the cheerful fat Banker, who made it his business to keep the pro-German party in roars of laughter every meal-time—presumably over the Allies’ gullibility—for once hadn’t a smile left and seemed completely nonplussed.

A shot rang out. Or was it only an extra loud bang on the tramway outside? There was evidently some fresh trouble—perhaps a daylight Zeppelin raid. Just then a French friend passed.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ she said, excitedly. ‘We have taken the post-office and the telegraph; not without some fighting. It was early this morning. Come out with me and see what arrives.’

King Constantine’s fête seemed to be off.

The life of the seaport was going on much as usual, except that the quay in front had rather an empty look. But as we turned up a side street, to avoid the press of the Rue Venizelos, we ran into a big crowd. What it was all about was difficult to discover, but it surged round a bewildered-looking Serbian soldier who was being dragged away with some difficulty by a patrol of Greek police. We flattened ourselves against the wall while the angry waves swept past.

In their back-wash we came on the Official Photographer hard at work, charmed to have something to take at last. We questioned him eagerly, but he had only the vaguest notion as to what was on foot. Anyway, here was copy, when the photographs appeared in the London papers the editors could christen them what they liked. And he rushed on in the wake of the ebb-tide, snapshotting as he went.

The Bureau des Postes was our objective. There had been brave doings there, so we had been told. But the spot, when we reached it, appeared fairly peaceful. In a corner of the square a little knot of people had collected round a tall Serbian officer, while a weedy-looking Greek youth explained with some courage, as it seemed to us from the looks of the bystanders, what proved to be the true story of the arrest we had just witnessed.

He had been sitting quietly in that café there up the street, everyone round him busy discussing the King’s fête, when a Greek at the next table had shouted out, suddenly: ‘À bas le Roi!’ and then instantly jumped up and denounced the innocent Serbian as the ill-wisher of Greece’s idol, and called loudly for the police—lèse-majesté being as grave a crime in Greece as in Germany. It was a put-up job.

The tall officer listened attentively, taking notes as he did so. Then mounting his horse, he vanished after the photographer and his prey.

We turned to the post-office at last to try and send a telegram necessitated by my enforced change of plans. But for all its peaceful air it was closely guarded. The imposing French ‘dragon’ at the entrance much regretted, but it was impossible for Madame to do any such thing. ‘Why, what had happened?’ Ah, how should he know? Those were his orders. A British Tommy at another door proved equally correct, but less unbending. He knew nothing officially, of course. ‘Oh, yes, the post-office had been collared this morning—about time, too.’

‘There had been trouble, hadn’t there?’

‘Oh, bless you, no, Mum. They looked very fierce-like at first, fired a few shots and all that, but when they saw we meant it, came out as tame as a Macedonian tortoise.’ As to what was happening inside, he knew no more than we did, but he ventured to guess ‘The Frenchmen are going through Tino’s billets-doux to the Bulgars all right.’

Now the crowd had melted the empty streets wore a curiously menacing air. The grim black vistas of tightly closed iron doors and shutters were more unpleasantly suggestive than the former rioting and noise. Calling on a friendly Consul and his wife was a work of some difficulty. Other unexpected sentries had to be faced. It took time before the suspicious old Turkish concierge would open the courtyard door wide enough to let us squeeze through. The family party within were quite cheerful and unconcerned, but as Monsieur remarked when we were on the point of leaving: ‘Ces émeutes arrivent souvent ici; nous avons eu trois guerres. Je trouve c’est toujours mieux de rester chez soi.’

We took his advice. As we reached home I encountered the Commander, delighted with the change. Now he could stop these wretched local steamers blowing their sirens all day long below his office windows. For there was more noise and fuss when a coasting boat left the quay-side than the whole fleet of the largest liners could possible require.

The English military band, which played to the populace every Saturday afternoon, had become quite a feature of life at Salonica; one could fancy oneself in a peaceful Anglo-Indian station watching the curious semi-Oriental throng gathered at the foot of the old White Tower—a tower built by the Venetians, formerly part of the town walls, but now left stranded like a huge rock in a child’s seashore garden.

The afternoon of the ‘émeute’ the White Tower looked strangely quiet. Gone were the gaily-coloured crowds, the family parties of Israelites and Dumés, the men in their historic furred gabardines wearing the Moslem fez, their wives in their long satin coats and brocade aprons—blue, prune, and violet, the favourite Jewish colours—with curious green, parakeet-like head-dresses, low lace bodices, and necklaces of many rows of seed pearls; the younger women copying Athens and Paris in short skirts and high-heeled yellow boots, for fashions change now the Turks have left.

No pipers played that afternoon to a delighted audience who followed their every movement up and down. The soldiers and sailors of the Allied nations, who usually collected to talk to their friends while they listened to the music, were nowhere to be seen.

The place was empty I thought as we reached it. But, no, among the beds of pansies, stocks, and daisies and the carefully watered little plots of grass, great, grey motor-lorries were drawn up. And there were the French machine-gunners perched on their guns. Very bored they looked, with a populace and soldiery which sat tight behind its iron doors and shutters and wisely refused to come out.

A forest of blue and white flags, festooned with fir branches, fluttered valiantly in the breeze. But no other sign of life and festivity could be seen down the three main roads commanded by the guns. There was nothing doing. As we passed, the soldiers in field-blue were reduced to re-reading their month-old Illustrations and Petit Journals.

Under the pine trees in the little café garden beyond, at this hour usually crammed with people, only two nursemaids gossiped together, while their accompanying children and dogs played about unrebuked in the sun.

A nervous-looking waiter brought us tea, having peeped out cautiously and spied us sitting at one of his little tin tables close to the sea-wall. The revolution was falling flat, we had given it up, and were busy discussing the various possibilities of catching a ship home—a matter of great moment to my present companion fresh from six months unrelieved front trenches.

We had not been there long before a gardener appeared and started his evening round of watering. The grass and flowers must not suffer, whatever happened outside his domain. As he came towards us I looked up and noticed that a few more people had crept out and were moving about aimlessly. Then some soldiers walked in carrying instruments; though late, there was to be a band after all.

It settled itself, got out its music, struck up and was soon playing merrily. But to our astonishment it was a Greek band this time—our soldier and sailor musicians were otherwise occupied while General Sarrail took the town. Since the early morning most of the Greek troops had been shut up in their barracks, in case of serious trouble. These must have been specially released. However it was done, it was managed quite amicably, and as we left, instead of an Allied band playing in a Greek seaport, this Saturday afternoon here was a Greek band playing in a French enclave. The ‘émeute’ had ended. King Constantine’s fête-day was not without music of sorts.

Sita.

WILLIAM DE MORGAN: A REMINISCENCE.

One dark and snowy day last winter a distinguished company met in the Old Church at Chelsea to do honour to the memory of Henry James. Once more this January, under the same grey and gloomy skies, with the same war-cloud hanging like a pall over the land, another memorable gathering took place in the ancient riverside shrine, when the last rites were paid to another illustrious Chelsea resident, William De Morgan. Henry James, greatly as he had endeared himself to us all and nobly as he had thrown in his lot with England in these anxious times, had only recently made his home in this neighbourhood, but William De Morgan had been closely connected with Chelsea for nearly half-a-century. Chelsea was the scene of his triumphs both in art and literature. Here he set up his first kiln, in a garden at the back of Cheyne Row, and here too, in later years, he wrote his famous novels.

His family was of French origin. He told me how one of his Huguenot ancestors, four generations back, went out to India, and married two Frenchwomen in succession. His son, Auguste De Morgan, came over to England, settled here, and became the grandfather of the distinguished mathematician, Augustus De Morgan, who held the post of Professor of Mathematics at University College for more than thirty years, and married the daughter of another mathematician of note, the Cambridge Lecturer William Frend. This Mrs. De Morgan was a remarkable woman, of cultured tastes, whose beautiful face and lively interest in the people and things about her made her still attractive in old age. She is fondly remembered by many of her friends in Chelsea. Their eldest son, William De Morgan, was born at 69 Gower Street in 1839, and took up painting as a profession, before he turned his attention to pottery. His sister, Mary De Morgan, who died eight or nine years ago, was an able and talented woman—a marked contrast to her brother in appearance, being small and slight, with a sharp voice and abrupt manner. She amused people by her quick repartees and witty sayings and wrote several fairy-tales, which recalled Hans Andersen by their imaginative charm. The first of these—‘On a Pincushion’—was published in 1877, and illustrated with drawings by William De Morgan; the last—‘Wind-fairies’—appeared in 1900, and was dedicated to Angela, Dennis, and Clare Mackail, the grandchildren of Edward Burne-Jones. Mary De Morgan also wrote a striking novel, called ‘A Choice of Chance,’ which was published in 1887, under the nom de plume of William Dodson, a name which effectually concealed the writer’s identity. The gift of story-writing was evidently in the family, although in William De Morgan’s case it was to lie dormant for many years.

In 1871, on the death of his father, William De Morgan brought his mother and sisters to live in Cheyne Row, two doors from Carlyle’s home, and began to make his fine lustre-ware in a picturesque old building known as Orange House. After his marriage to Miss Evelyn Pickering in 1888, he settled in a charming old house in The Vale, where he and his wife lived until it was pulled down more than twenty years later, when they moved into a corner house in Church Street. Their winters, however, were chiefly spent in Florence, partly for the sake of De Morgan’s never robust health, partly in order to be near his wife’s uncle, the painter, Spencer Stanhope, who was a prominent member of the English colony in that city. But after the death of this relative the ties which bound the De Morgans to Florence were loosened, and in 1912 they finally gave up their Italian home to spend the whole year in Chelsea.

From his early youth William De Morgan was the intimate friend of Burne-Jones and William Morris, whose artistic aims and tastes he shared, and was a frequent and welcome visitor at the Grange and at Kelmscott House. His simple childlike nature, his ready wit and love of fun, made him a great favourite with the young people in both households. Lady Burne-Jones has told us what an active part he took in their family life, both in joy and sorrow, at one time amusing her children and their young cousin, Rudyard Kipling, with his merry pranks, and on another occasion, when she herself was dangerously ill, sitting up all night with her distracted husband. And Miss May Morris remembers the delight of her whole family when her father wrote to say that he was bringing De Morgan back from town to spend a few days at Kelmscott. De Morgan himself was never tired of recalling these blissful summer holidays in the old Manor on the Upper Thames, when he and Morris roamed up and down the lovely Cotswold country in search of a suitable place for their workshops. Eventually, in 1882, he built a factory for his tiles near Morris’s works at Merton Abbey, and his jars and dishes of glowing ruby and mother-of-pearl were always to be seen in the Morris Company’s showrooms in Oxford Street. In beauty of shape and colour, these lovely things recalled the wonderful Gubbio ware wrought by Messer Giorgio in Renaissance times, while De Morgan’s Persian tiles came so near to those which Lord Leighton brought from Damascus to decorate his Arab court, that it was almost impossible to detect any difference between the two.

Unfortunately, in spite of its decorative charm and of the general admiration which it aroused, De Morgan’s pottery never proved a commercial success. This was partly due to the great cost of production, and partly no doubt to his own lack of business capacity. Like the French potter Palissy, whom in many ways he resembled, De Morgan’s fertile brain was always busy with fresh ideas, always starting out on untrodden tracks and attempting new experiments. If one of these happened to prove successful, he promptly frittered away his earnings in making fresh ventures on a new and grander scale. His kindness and liberality to the workmen in his service were unbounded. He took the deepest interest in their welfare, and countless instances of his generosity to individuals are on record.

During the winters which he spent abroad he was still busy with new experiments and inventions, and set up a shop in his garden in Florence, where he trained Italian workmen to paint tiles with Persian colours under the glaze. But by degrees his connection with the work ceased, and about ten years ago the factory was closed and the moulds destroyed, to the great regret of all lovers of art.

It was just at this moment, when William De Morgan was already sixty-six, that he startled the world and amazed his most intimate friends by revealing himself in a new and altogether unexpected capacity. Suddenly, without any warning, the great potter appeared before the public as a successful novelist. There are comparatively few men in any age who have attained distinction in two separate branches of art. Great poet-painters there have been, it is true, such as Michelangelo in Italy of the Renaissance, and Dante Rossetti in our own times, but there was generally a close connection between their creations in the different arts. Either the picture was inspired by the sonnet, or the verses gave birth to the painting. It would be difficult to trace any connection between De Morgan’s tiles and the novels which his prolific pen poured forth in his later years. Yet, as I have often heard him explain, his novels were indirectly the result of his work as a potter. It was during these first fifty years of his life, when he was busily engaged in making experiments and looking about for boys and men whom he could train to help him, that he acquired the familiarity with the working classes and dwellers in the slums which is one of the most striking features of his novels. The close and daily contact into which he was brought with his own potters, listening to their talk and watching them at work as he sat in a corner of the factory making designs or meditating new inventions, gave him that intimate knowledge of their habits and language, that insight into the points of view and prejudices of their class of which he writes with so much sympathy and kindly humour.

As a boy he remembered being told by his father, the professor of mathematics, that he possessed some literary power, and that if he applied himself to books he might do something in that line. But in those early days, young De Morgan’s sole ambition was to be a painter. So he entered the Academy school and, like Charles Heath in ‘Alice-for-Short,’ gave up painting to design stained glass, giving this up in turn when, about the age of thirty, he started his experiments as a potter. But he never made any attempt at original composition until he wrote his first novel, ‘Joseph Vance,’ when he was well on in the sixties.

It was at this interesting moment in De Morgan’s career, in the summer of 1906, that I had the good fortune to meet him at a country house, where he was staying with one of his oldest friends. We had often met before, generally at Burne-Jones’ house, and as I sat by his side at dinner we recalled those happy times and sighed for the days and the friends that were no more. George Howard, Lord Carlisle, who happened to be my other neighbour, joined in our conversation and agreed with all De Morgan said of the brilliant play of fantasy, the wit and tenderness, the indefinable charm which made our beloved painter the most delightful companion in the world. And with tears in his eyes, De Morgan said how it was always thus in life. ‘We fail to realise the importance of the present and let the good days go by, without any attempt to keep a record of our friends’ words and actions, until it is too late.’ Towards the end of dinner he dropped his voice and whispered that he had a secret to tell me. ‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘I have perpetrated the crime or the folly—whichever you choose to call it—of writing a novel, which has just been published, and what is more wonderful I have in my pocket a flattering review of the book, in to-day’s Spectator!’ He went on to tell me how the story of ‘Joseph Vance’ had grown into being; how when he was ill and away in Florence, a rheumatic hand disabled him from drawing, so he took to scribbling instead, and began to jot down ideas that came into his head, on scraps of paper; how his wife encouraged him to go on with the story; and how he became interested first of all in the character of Christopher Vance, the drunken old builder, and then in that of his heroine, ‘Lossie,’ till the actual writing became a pleasure and the book took its present shape. The speaker’s earnestness and animation, I remember, excited Lord Carlisle’s curiosity, and after dinner he asked me if what he had caught of our conversation could be true and De Morgan had really written a novel. There was no denying the fact, and soon we were all reading ‘Joseph Vance’ and the friendly review which had given its author so much satisfaction.

From the first the success of the book was phenomenal. The girls in the office where the manuscript was typed became so much absorbed in the story that they forgot to go on with their work. The critics were unanimous in their chorus of praise, in spite of the unusual length of the book, which at first seemed likely to prove a stumbling-block. Mr. Punch pronounced ‘Joseph Vance’ to be quite the best novel which he had read for a long time, and the public on both sides of the Atlantic hailed the advent of a new star in the literary horizon.

The plunge once made, William De Morgan went merrily on, and novel after novel poured forth in rapid succession from his pen. ‘Joseph Vance’ was followed in 1907 by ‘Alice-for-Short,’ which contains the author’s reminiscences of his experiences as an art-student, and is dedicated to the memory of Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Then came ‘Somehow Good,’ in which the lively ‘Sally’ rivalled his first creation, ‘Lossie,’ in the affections of the writer, as in those of his readers. Indeed, after the manner of authors, De Morgan confessed that he had fallen in love with his latest creation, but that he was not in the least responsible for Sally’s erratic conduct, as she simply went her own way and did whatever she liked with him. The wife’s meeting with her long-lost husband was, he sometimes said, the passage by which he wished to be remembered, just as Thackeray used to say that Becky Sharp’s pride in her Guardsman was what he himself should select as the best thing that he had written.

In 1909 De Morgan published a two-volume novel, ‘It Never can Happen Again,’ which he dedicated to the memory of Ralph, second Earl of Lovelace, ‘in remembrance of two long concurrent lives, and an uninterrupted friendship.’ Lord Lovelace (who died in 1906) he always said had been his earliest friend in Chelsea. His mother, Ada, daughter of Lord Byron, and first Countess of Lovelace, used to study mathematics with Professor Augustus De Morgan, and their children had known each other from the age of eight or nine. This new book was hardly as successful as its predecessors, although the episode of the blind beggar Jim and ’Lizer Ann was as fresh and delightful as anything its author had ever written.

Lord Lovelace himself once aptly described De Morgan’s novels as ‘the work of an idealist with realistic details,’ combining the sentiments and traditions of the Victorian age with the more analytical methods of the present generation. His sensitiveness to the deep impressions left on the youthful mind by passing sights and sounds, and to the strange way in which these trivial incidents weave themselves about the great events of life, was a noteworthy feature of De Morgan’s writings. Another striking feature of his novels was the vigour and animation of the dialogue, whether he chronicles the sayings of East-end beggars or West-end charwomen—a class with which he seems to have possessed a close and intimate acquaintance—or whether he sets down the lively prattle of Florentine gardeners and barbers or the almost preternatural quickness of repartee possessed by the small urchins of the slums. These are all recorded in the writer’s own inimitable fashion, with the same note of originality, the same gentle irony and warm sympathy, together with a youthful optimism which never seemed to grow old. Dickens, it has often been remarked, was the model on which De Morgan fashioned his style, but there is less of caricature in the characters which De Morgan draws, they are more real and human, and always lovable. The digressions in which he often indulges, taking the reader into his confidence and moralising on love and parting, on death and a future life, seem rather to recall Thackeray.

In his next novel, ‘An Affair of Dishonour,’ which appeared in 1910, De Morgan made a new departure. Leaving contemporary England and London of the Victorian age, he placed the scene of Sir Oliver and Lucinda’s adventures in the days of the Restoration, and introduced a graphic account of the naval battle of Solebay into the story. Several good judges rank this tale amongst the author’s best efforts, but De Morgan himself was not of this opinion, and when an admirer congratulated him on his new ‘tour de force,’ he replied ‘Say, rather, tour de faiblesse!’

The enforced break up of his old home in the Vale, Chelsea, and the move to another house in Church Street, were serious interruptions in De Morgan’s placid life, and when we met in the following summer he told me that for the last six months he had not been able to write a line, adding that it was perhaps just as well, since during the last five years he had written and published above a million and a quarter words! By the end of 1910, however, he and his wife were happily settled in their new home, to which they soon became deeply attached. That winter they spent Christmas in London for the first time, and before long decided to give up their house in Florence and make their home entirely in Chelsea. Here they lived happily, surrounded by old friends and their own beautiful works of art—De Morgan’s lustre-ware and Persian tiles, and his wife’s pictures. Mrs. De Morgan was an accomplished artist, and before her marriage her works appeared for many years at the Grosvenor and New Gallery exhibitions. Her industry was still as great as ever, and she went on painting her pictures while De Morgan wrote his novels. Music was another of their favourite occupations. They were regular attendants at the Albert Hall Sunday Concerts and the musical afternoons at Leighton House, and when they settled in Church Street De Morgan found a new source of delight in the pianola. He became the proud possessor of an Angelus, which he played all the evenings, and declared that it first revealed Beethoven to him. But long before this he had loved and studied the great master’s works, and readers of ‘Joseph Vance’ will remember the fine passage in which he describes the comfort that came to the bereaved widower in a dark hour, through hearing a movement of the Waldstein Sonata.

During the winter and spring of 1911 De Morgan found time to write another short novel, called ‘A Likely Story,’ in which he tried—not altogether successfully—to weave an Italian tale of the sixteenth century into the modern life of Chelsea. But the Italian part of the book is told with consummate art, and might almost pass as the work of Bandello or Luigi da Porto.

There was, however, general rejoicing among the readers of De Morgan’s novels when he returned to his older and more familiar vein in his second two-volume novel, ‘When Ghost meets Ghost,’ which appeared early in 1914. The plot of the story turns on the adventures of twin sisters, who are parted by a cruel fate in their youth, and only meet again after interminable vicissitudes and delays, when they are eighty years of age. This time his interest in the tale and the pleasure which he took in elaborating every detail carried him beyond his usual limits, and the story in its original form made up over a thousand pages. When in response to a gentle remonstrance from his publisher he succeeded in cutting out two hundred pages, he found it absolutely necessary to add another fifty or sixty, ‘to fill up the gaps.’ But in spite of its great length, much of the book was written in the author’s happiest manner, and many of his critics placed it next to ‘Joseph Vance’ in their estimation.

The letters which he received on this occasion, as he said in his quaint fashion, ‘greatly alimented his vanity.’ But he noticed that most of his readers referred to ‘Joseph Vance’ as his best book and to ‘Lossie’ as their favourite heroine. He confessed that for his part ‘Janey’ was ‘his darling,’ and took great pains to explain that she was not to be regarded as a ‘pis-aller,’ but as the best possible helpmeet for Joseph Vance—the true wife of his soul. One thing which surprised and gratified him extremely was the warm appreciation expressed for his novels by so many of the clergy—‘even Canons and Bishops’ of the Church of England, ‘in spite of all his heresies!’ It was in recognition of this kindly attitude that he felt it necessary to introduce a good parson into his novel, ‘It Never can Happen Again,’ in the person of the Rector, Athelstan Taylor, who refutes the ‘ultra-liberal views’ expressed by Alfred Challis.

He came to the conclusion that what attracted ecclesiastics of this description in his writings must be his ‘immortalism.’ As he always insisted, he had a firm faith in an overruling Providence which orders all things well, and in a future life where we shall see and know our lost friends once more.

It is pleasant to know that the success of De Morgan’s novels brought him the material rewards which his artistic pottery had failed to command, and better still to feel how thoroughly he enjoyed the fame and prosperity which had at length crowned his labours. He took a child-like pleasure in the letters which reached him from devoted admirers in all parts of the world, and often said that he was quite ashamed of the magnificent sums which he received from American publishers. The popularity of his novels showed no signs of diminishing. Each one was awaited with the same impatience, and in one instance a distinguished statesman who knew that his days were numbered, begged to see advance proofs of the forthcoming novel that was announced in the daily press, in order that he might enjoy this last pleasure before his death.

In November 1910, De Morgan was the guest of honour at a dinner given by the Society of Authors, but his gratification at the compliment thus paid him was considerably damped when he found that he was expected to make a speech! So nervous was he at the prospect that he would not allow Mrs. De Morgan to be present, lest he should disgrace himself by breaking down. But, although his voice at first sounded a little weak and quavering, he got through the ordeal well, and amused his hearers by a good-humoured allusion to a boycott which his last novel had sustained at the hands of one of the largest circulating libraries, which had rejected it as being improper. This, he suspected, was rather due to the fact that he had outraged the feelings of circulating libraries by venturing to publish a novel in two volumes. But he confessed that he could not help feeling rather hurt at the treatment which he had received, because of the singular respect that he had always felt for libraries, ever since the day, sixty-six years before, when his mother first took him, as a small boy, into Mudie’s Library. He still remembered clearly how, as he stood with his chin resting on the counter, he saw a tall gentleman step out from the back of the shop and hand his mother a parcel of books. ‘That,’ said Mrs. De Morgan, ‘was Mr. Mudie.’ He never forgot the thrill which the words sent through him.

Long residence in Chelsea had made William De Morgan familiar with its chief landmarks and leading inhabitants. He had known Carlyle and Rossetti, Whistler and William Bell Scott, John Hungerford Pollen and many other celebrities of past days. The historic monuments in the Old Church, and the families whom they commemorate, the Cheynes and Petitts, the Laurences and Danvers, were a theme of which he was never tired. He mourned over the destruction of the old wooden Battersea bridge that figured so often in Whistler’s paintings and etchings. He had many stories to tell of the part which it had played in the old life of Chelsea, and of the health-giving properties associated with the structure in the minds of former inhabitants. There was, it appears, a popular superstition among Chelsea folk some fifty years ago that seven currents of air met in the middle span of the bridge. A carpenter who is still living vividly remembers being taken by his mother to stand on the bridge, on a bitterly cold March day, with his six brothers and sisters, who were all suffering from whooping-cough. It must have been a case of kill or cure, but in this instance the good woman’s faith seems to have been justified, for all her seven children got over the whooping-cough and grew up hale and hearty.

In spite, however, of his affection for Chelsea and its people, De Morgan never forgot Italy and the Florentine home where he and his wife had spent so many happy seasons. He missed the sun and the flowers and thought with regret of his friend Spencer Stanhope, whose death had left so great a blank in the English colony at Florence. Often he recalled the painter’s lovely home at Villa Nuti, where the De Morgans always spent the week-end, and their pleasant walks up the steep hillside, on radiant April mornings, when Val d’Arno lay below in the first flush of spring loveliness.

One evening towards dusk I happened to meet him in Chelsea, in front of a new Roman church which has been built of recent years in Cheyne Row. The door stood open and we saw the priest within reciting the office of Benediction, the clouds of incense rising heavenwards and the gleam of silver and lighted candles on the altar. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I like that, it makes me feel I am at home again!’ And then it flashed across him that this church stood on the exact spot where his first pottery kiln had been set up, in the garden of Orange House; and so, as he said, ‘it really was his home.’

The sudden outbreak of war, in August 1914, found the indefatigable author busy with a new novel which promised to be both original and entertaining. It was the story of his own recollections of life in Chelsea during the last fifty years, put in the mouth of an old pauper exactly his own age, who was supposed to be living in the workhouse near his home. But, like many other authors, De Morgan found it impossible to go on writing when his whole soul was absorbed in the life and death struggle in which the Empire found itself involved. The new novel was left unfinished, but since a considerable part had been already written, it is to be hoped that both this fragment, and another novel on which he had been for some time engaged, may eventually see the light.

During the next two years and a half, De Morgan thought of little but the war. He followed every step of the campaign by land and by sea, and did his utmost to enlighten public opinion abroad and in the United States. More than this, he devoted a great part of his time to making scientific experiments at the Polytechnic and perfecting new discoveries, which might prove useful in submarine warfare. All his old love for chemistry now revived, and many were the suggestions for saving life and destroying hostile craft which he sent to the Board of Admiralty.

The splendid optimism and youthful enthusiasm which were so marked a feature of his character carried him safely through the darkest days of the last two winters. He took keen interest in an exhibition of his wife’s symbolical paintings dealing with subjects suggested by the war, which was held in Chelsea last spring, and was very proud of the substantial sum which it realised for the English and Italian Red Cross Societies. All through these anxious months his familiar figure was frequently to be seen in the streets of Chelsea. You met him in the morning doing his own marketing and carrying provisions home, and late in the dusk of evening he was constantly to be seen setting out on a rapid walk along the Embankment. Often you caught sight of him stopping at a street corner to exchange greetings with some old inhabitant or engaged in earnest conversation with a soldier in khaki just back from the front. The tall figure was slightly bowed with advancing years, and Time had whitened the locks and beard that were once a rich brown, but the brisk, alert step and clear blue eyes with their frank, kindly glance, were still the same as ever.

The last time I saw him he was singularly bright and hopeful. He had thoroughly enjoyed a short September holiday at Lyme Regis, and was eloquent on the beauty of the Dorset and Devon coast. And he spoke with the utmost confidence of the coming campaign on the Western front next spring. For him there could be no doubt as to the final issue of the struggle. The devil was let loose for a while and all the powers of evil were ranged against us in the battle, but right must conquer in the end, he felt convinced, and the hour of victory, he believed, was not far off. Alas! he was not destined to see the day to which he looked forward with such serene confidence. A sharp and sudden attack of influenza carried him off after a fortnight’s illness, and on the 15th of January he breathed his last. A few days later, a large company of the friends who had known and loved him met in the Old Church, which has played so great a part in the history of Chelsea and is so often mentioned in his books. Here his mortal remains were laid under a violet pall, bright with flowers, while sweet boy-voices sang his last Requiem. Among the mourners were the children and grandchildren of Burne-Jones and the daughter of William Morris. So, with the music and flowers which he had loved, and with familiar faces all around, he passed to his well-earned rest, followed by the love and gratitude of thousands whose lives had been cheered and gladdened by his genius.

Julia Cartwright.

UNCONQUERED: AN EPISODE OF 1914.

BY MAUD DIVER.

Copyright, 1917, by Mrs. Diver, in the United States of America.