my being; increasing to
rapture as I recognised in the approaching vehicle the familiar carriage
of the old doctor. If ever a god emerged from a machine, it was when
this heaven-sent friend, recognising us, stopped and jumped out with a
cheery hail. Harold rushed up to him at once. "Have you been there?" he
cried. "Was it a jolly fight? who beat? were there many people killed?"

The doctor appeared puzzled. I briefly explained the situation.

"I see," said the doctor, looking grave and twisting his face this way
and that. "Well, the fact is, there isn't going to be any battle to-day.
It's been put off, on account of the change in the weather. You will
have due notice of the renewal of hostilities. And now you'd better jump
in and I'll drive you home. You've been running a fine rig! Why, you
might have both been taken and shot as spies!"

This special danger had never even occurred to us. The thrill of it
accentuated the cosey homelike feeling of the cushions we nestled
into as we rolled homewards. The doctor beguiled the journey with
blood-curdling narratives of personal adventure in the tented field, he
having followed the profession of arms (so it seemed) in every quarter
of the globe. Time, the destroyer of all things beautiful, subsequently
revealed the baselessness of these legends; but what of that? There are
higher things than truth; and we were almost reconciled, by the time
we were dropped at our gate, to the fact that the battle had been
postponed.

THE FINDING OF THE PRINCESS.

It was the day I was promoted to a tooth-brush. The girls, irrespective
of age, had been thus distinguished some time before; why, we boys could
never rightly understand, except that it was part and parcel of a system
of studied favouritism on behalf of creatures both physically inferior
and (as was shown by a fondness for tale-bearing) of weaker mental
fibre. It was not that we yearned after these strange instruments in
themselves; Edward, indeed, applied his to the scrubbing-out of his
squirrel's cage, and for personal use, when a superior eye was grim
on him, borrowed Harold's or mine, indifferently; but the nimbus of
distinction that clung to them--that we coveted exceedingly. What more,
indeed, was there to ascend to, before the remote, but still possible,
razor and strop?

Perhaps the exaltation had mounted to my head; or nature and the perfect
morning joined to him at disaffection; anyhow, having breakfasted,
and t