LLANT VOLUNTEERS OF THE BRITISH
MINE CLEARANCE FORCE.]

* * * * *

[Illustration: "HULLO, GEORGE! AND WHEN'S THE WAR GOING TO BE OVER,
EH?"]

* * * * *

THE QUESTIONABLE ALIEN.

William, my hitherto unventuresome friend William, is going abroad. I
cannot be certain why. Perhaps he no longer feels his heroism equal
to the strain of living in a country fit for heroes. It may be that
he has unwittingly incubated a bacillus which figures in novels as the
"Call of the Wild." Anyhow, William is going abroad--so much so that,
if he went any farther, he would be on his way home again.

I need not say that I felt called upon to help William through this
trying period, and our preparations proceeded satisfactorily until the
clever geographers who arrange these things nowadays discovered that
William could fetch the Far East by way of the Far West. Then the
international complications set in. First, William's passport--a
healthy enough document at the start--had to be carried round the
diplomatic quarter of London until it broke out into a thick rash of
supplementary _visas_. Next we sought out the moneychangers in their
dens, to transmute William's viaticum bit by bit into four foreign
currencies. Then a Great Power through whose territory William will
have to pass apparently was nervous of his approach and instituted
a grand inquisition into the status and antecedents of the Alien
(William).

We unfolded the paper on our table and stared at it aghast. Its area
was rather less than a square yard; in colour it favoured the yolk of
bad eggs; while all over its broad expanse were ruled compartments,
half of them filled with questions that no gentleman would ask
another, the other half left blank for William's indignant replies. We
managed with great difficulty to squeeze into the panel provided all
his baptismal titles--there are four of these besides "William"--and
then attacked the first real poser:--

_Are you in possession of 100 dollars, or less? If less, by how much?_

William groaned. "Reach me down Todhunter's Arithmetic, will you?"
said he.

I did so, and turned up the Money Market page of our daily paper.
Nothing was heard for the next five minutes but grunts and sighs of
despair. We then gave it up on the understanding that William must
make a point of winning heavily at bridge--or would it be euchre?--on
the way across.

_Have you ever been in