Irish Sergeant. "Keep yer head down there! Don't ye know that's the very place that Mike Rooney was shot through the fut?"
THEY.
Just lately I have been thinking often of Them. But Their image has never been more vividly in my mind than now, when I sit here among the aftermath of festival. I wonder, for example, are the homes in which They live pervaded with this same débris of Christmas (or, as They themselves are so fond of calling it, Yuletide)? Does dismembered turkey coldly furnish forth Their meals? Are there too many calendars, and a litter of crumpled paper? And cards—do They send each other cards? Stupendous thought!
Most of all is my fancy busy with Them to-morrow, Tuesday, December the twenty-eighth. I see Them rising, a little wearily, perhaps, and heavy-eyed. Breakfast They snatch, and so out into the winter morning towards that place where, unknown and unrecognised, They pursue throughout the year Their changeless toil. I imagine Them gathering with mutual greetings in the workroom—a little company about whose features I have so often speculated. Poets are there, and artists; probably some among the men may wear their hair a trifle longer than the military fashion of to-day; but the greater part of the crowd are almost certainly women. Now the talk dies down; presently They are all once more bending in silence over Their appointed tasks.
Yes, here at one desk is the artist to whose genius we owe the obese robin perched upon a horse-shoe, or the churchyard by moonlight after (apparently) a severe spangle-storm. Here again a poet, whose eye in a fine frenzy rolling proclaims an inspiration, or at least some subtle variant upon a familiar theme. He stoops and, even as I watch, has traced swiftly, with vibrant pen, this couplet:—
"The old, old wish I send to thee,