nd he sank into deeper oblivion,
holding the Thermos flask and binoculars against him like a child
clasping its dolls in its sleep.

It was just before we mobilised for the summer--a mobilisation which,
had we but known it, was to last until our book of pleasant memories
was thumbed and dog-eared and tattered with much usage--that the
Indiarubber Man suggested taking a day off and having what he called a
"stamp." He fetched our ordnance map and spread it on the ward-room
table, and we pored over it most of the evening, sucking our pipes.

All Devon is good; and for a while the lanes had called us, winding
from one thatched village to another between their fragrant,
high-banked hedges. "Think of the little pubs . . ." said the
Indiarubber Man dreamily. We thought of them, but with the vision came
one of cyclists of the grey-sweater variety, and motorists filling the
air with petrol fumes and dust.

There was the river: woodland paths skirting in the evening a world of
silver and grey, across which bats sketched zigzag flights. Very nice
in the dimpsey light, but stuffy in the daytime. So the moor had it in
the end. We would trudge the moor from north to south, never seeing a
soul, and, aided by map and compass, learn the peace of a day spent off
the beaten tracks of man.

We had been in the train some time before the Indiarubber Man made his
electrifying discovery.

"Where's the map?" We eyed one another severely and searched our
pockets. "We were looking at it before I went to get the tickets," he
pursued. "I gave it to you to fold up."

So he had. I left it on the station seat.

At a wayside station bookstall we managed to unearth an alleged
reproduction of the fair face of South Devon to replace the lost map.

The Indiarubber Man traced the writhings of several caterpillars with
his pipe-stem. "These are tors," he explained generously. After this
we studied the map in silence, vainly attempting to confirm our
recollections of a course marked out the previous evening on an
ordnance survey map.

We were both getting slightly confused when, with a screech of brakes,
the train pulled up at the little moorside station that was our
destination by rail. Sunlight bathed the grey buildings on the
platform and the sleepy village beyond. From the blue overhead came
the thin, sweet notes of a lark, and as we listened in the stillness we
heard a faint whispering "swish" like the sound of a very distant
re