the fauna of the trenches.

* * * * *

THE PERFECT CUSTOMER.

It was a very ordinary country sale of work. The Countess of Bilberry
declared it open in a neat little speech, and then bought generously
from every stall: her daughter, whose smile nobody could resist, did a
fine trade with raffle tickets for the record pumpkin produced by the
local allotments: Mrs. Dodd, the Rector's wife, presided over a pair
of scales and a strictly rationed tea, and all the rest of the village
sold vegetables and socks and pincushions, and tried to pretend that
antimacassars and shaving tidies and woolwork waistbelts were the most
desirable things in the world when they were made by wounded men at
the nearest Red Cross Hospital, in whose aid the sale was held.

But there was one unique figure amongst all the folk who knew each
other, and each other's clothes, and each other's clothes' cost, so
well. She arrived at the Village Hall in a pony-carriage, drawn by
the ugliest little pony that ever sniffed oats. She was very quietly
and very tastefully dressed, and, instead of concentrating on the
well-laden stalls of garden produce or the orderly stacks of knitted
comforts, or the really useful baskets, she went straight to the stall
which even Mrs. Dodd, who had the kindest heart in the countryside,
had been compelled to relegate to a dark corner. There was
woolwork run riot over cushions of incredible hardness; there were
candle-shades guaranteed to catch alight at the mere sight of a match;
there were crochet dressing-table mats, and there was a three-legged
stool on which even a fairy could not have sat without danger of a
break-down.

The youngest Miss Dodd, a severely practical young lady of sixteen,
who was presiding at this stall, jumped up in surprise at the sight of
a customer, and in doing so knocked over a glass box bound with red
and white and blue ribbon, with "Handkerchiefs" painted across the
corner in a design of forget-me-nots. There was very little glass box
left when she picked it up, and the splinters had made a good many
little craters in the surface of a big bowl of clotted cream, labelled
"Positively the last appearance for the Duration of the War," which
was at the corner of the next stall.

The little stranger said that she would take the box and the damaged
cream too; she bought a whole family of crochet mats with centres
of orange woollen loops; three pincushions made of playi