one would think,
for use, smiled. Seeing that smile he said:

"Well, what do yu want? Proper little gem, ain't yu!" And suddenly
looking up at me, he added with a sort of bashful glee: "My old
people'll go fair mad when they see me--go fair mad they will." He
seemed to dwell on the thought, and I saw the wife give him a long soft
smiling look. He added suddenly:

"I'll 'ave to travel back, though, Saturday--catch the six o'clock from
Victoria, Sunday--to cross over there."

Very soon after that we arrived at where he changed, and putting on his
goatskin, his cap, and overcoat, he got out behind his wife, carrying
with the utmost care those queer companions, his baby and his rifle.

Where is he now? Alive, dead? Who knows?

1915.

VII

THE RECRUIT

Several times since that fateful Fourth of August he had said: "I sh'll
'ave to go."

And the farmer and his wife would look at him, he with a sort of
amusement, she with a queer compassion in her heart, and one or the
other would reply smiling: "That's all right, Tom, there's plenty
Germans yet. Yu wait a bit."

His mother, too, who came daily from the lonely cottage in the little
combe on the very edge of the big hill to work in the kitchen and farm
dairy, would turn her dark taciturn head, with still plentiful black
hair, towards his face which, for all its tan, was so weirdly
reminiscent of a withered baby, pinkish and light-lashed, with forelock
and fair hair thin and rumpled, and small blue eyes, and she would
mutter:

"Don't yu never fret, boy. They'll come for 'ee fast enough when they
want 'ee." No one, least of all perhaps his mother, could take quite
seriously that little square short-footed man, born when she was just
seventeen. Sure of work because he was first-rate with every kind of
beast, he was yet not looked on as being quite 'all there.' He could
neither read nor write, had scarcely ever been outside the parish, and
then only in a shandrydan on a Club treat, and he knew no more of the
world than the native of a small South Sea Island. His life from school
age on had been passed year in, year out, from dawn till dark, with the
cattle and their calves, the sheep, the horses and the wild moor ponies;
except when hay or corn harvest, or any exceptionally exacting festival
absorbed him for the moment. From shyness he never went into the bar of
the Inn, and so had missed the greater part of village education. He
could of course read no pap