The Judge. "Three years."
Optimistic Prisoner: "Couldn't you make it 'three years or the duration of the War,' me lud?"
IDENTIFICATION.
How often the kind of thing occurs that I am about to describe!
Four or five summers ago, before the world went mad, I was on one of David MacBrayne's steamers on the way to a Scotch island. Among the few passengers was an interesting man, with whom I fell into conversation. He was a vigorous, bulky, very tall man, with a pointed grey beard and a mass of grey hair under a panama, and he was bound, he told me, for a well-known fishing-lodge, whither he went every August. He had been a great traveller and knew Persia well; he had also been in Parliament, and one of his sons was in the siege of Mafeking. So much I remember of his affairs; but his name I did not learn. We talked much about books, and I put him on to Doughty's Arabia Deserta.
I have often thought of him since and wondered who he was, and whenever I have met fishermen or others likely to be acquainted with this attractive and outstanding personality I have asked about him; but never with success. And then last week I seemed really to be on the track, for I found that my new neighbour in the country has also had the annual custom of spending a fortnight or so in the same Scotch island, and he claims to know everyone who ever visits that retired spot.
So this is what happened.
"If you're so old an islander as that," I said, "you're the very person to solve the problem that I have carried about for four or five years. There's a man who fishes regularly up there"—and then I described my fellow-passenger. "Tell me," I said, "who he is."