"Two hundred and fifty. And what does that mean? It means that at seven-thirty o'clock on the night of December the 8th two hundred and fifty residents of Blanktown will turn out the electric lights in their drawing-rooms... perhaps even in their halls... and proceed to the lecture-room. True, the lecture-room will be lit up—a small compensation—but not for long. When the slides of Vesuvius are thrown upon the screen—"
Celia was going pale.
"But if it's not you," she faltered, "it will be somebody else."
"No; if I refuse, it will be too late then to get a substitute. Besides they must have tried everybody else before they got down to me... Celia, already the Zeppelin scare has shaken your stock severely; this will be the final blow. It is noble of you to sacrifice———"
"Don't go!" she cried in anguish.
I gave a deep sigh.
"For your sake," I said, "I won't."
So that settles it. If my lecture on "First Principles in Homeopathy" is ever to be delivered, it must be delivered elsewhere.
HERO-WORSHIP.
Slightly soiled Urchin. "Please, Mr. General, if yer wouldn't mind bendin' dahn a bit, me an' Emma 'd like to give yer a kiss."
Every November, just as I am beginning to look sadly down the long vista of apple—apple-tart, apple-pudding, stewed apple and custard, apple-charlotte and apple-dumpling—that stretches all the way from now to rhubarb, come cranberries.
I had forgotten them, as I do every year, and the pinky-red that tinged the knife yesterday, as soon as it entered what I feared was an apple-tart, ran right up my arm and spread in a glow to my face. Dear cranberries!
And doubly dear just now. How did you manage it? All the way from Archangel, was it—threading your way through mines and submarines, and not a keg broken, not a cranberry exploded? Thank you, Jellicoe.
Or are you a Southern Slav, a Crim-Tartar? And did you dare the Dardanelles, give the Goeben the slip, and disappoint the German ganders of their sauce? Artful ally!
Where is your home, bright berry? What are your habits? Do you push through the snow on the steppes? Do you flower in the first thaw of spring, set in full summer and ripen when the snow falls again? I think so; you have the savour of snow. I hope so; I picture the snowfields stained with your blood when you burst.
We've known too little of you, but we shall want to know more now. The Vicar said the war would do good in more ways than one. It does it now; it sets me thinking.
Learning, too. My landlady, for whom I had composed a simple object-lesson on the value of a strong Navy, pricked all my bubbles with, "Russian, Sir? Did you say Russian? I wouldn't have a bit o' foreign fruit in the house. Them berries was picked in my sister's garden on the moors."
"Helmets galore strew the fields. Rifles, motor lorries, and field kitchens are common finds. Some day they will be collected, and—such is the scandalous heartlessness of mankind—distributed as souvenirs of the great Armageddon of 1914."—Daily Chronicle.
In case anybody wishes to bring us home a souvenir, we are keeping a little place on our writing-desk for a field-kitchen.
