men, though He only turned out a few
of 'em perfect, and some only just a little better than the ruck."

He roused himself from the brown study that brought into relief many
lurking lines and furrows in the thin, keen face, as the Chief Medical
Officer, fixing him through suspicious eyeglasses, demanded:

"Ye got your full allowance o' sleep last nicht?"

He nodded.

"Thanks to a Cockney babe in bandoliers, who was born not only with eyes
and ears, like other infants, but with the capacity for using 'em."

"Ay. It's remarr'kable how many men will daudle complacently through life,
from the cradle to the grave, wi'out the remotest consciousness that
they're practically blind and no better than deaf, as far as regards real
seeing and hearing. But who's your prodeegy?"

"One of Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. They put him on at the Convent with
another sentry, their first experience of a night on guard. By not being
in a hurry to challenge, and keeping his ears open while a conversation of
the confidentially-affectionate kind was going on between a Dutchman--a
fellow employed in the booking-office at the railway, on whom I've had my
eye for some little time past--and his sweetheart, my townie found out for
himself something that most of us knew before, and something else that we
wanted to know particularly badly...."

"Namely?"

"For one thing, that the town is a hotbed of spies, and that our friends
in laager outside are nightly communicated with by means of
flash-signals."

"And that's an indeesputable fact. Toch!" No other combination of letters
may convey the guttural, "Have I no' seen the lamps at warr'k mysel',
after darr'k, at the end o' the roads that debouch upon the veld! The
Dutchman would be able to plead precedent, I'm thinking."

"He will have plenty of time to think where he is at present. When the
sentry interfered he was instructing the young woman in a simple but
effective code of match-flare signals, by means of which she was to
communicate with him when he had cleared out. And he had announced his
intention of doing that without delay."

"An' skipping to his freends upo' the Borr'der.... Toch!" The network of
wrinkles tightened about the sharp little blue-grey eyes of the Chief
Medical Officer. "That would gie a thochtfu' man a kind o' notion that a
reese in the temperature may be expectit shortly. An' so you--slept
soundly on the strength o' many wakeful nichts to come? Ay, that would be
the kind