ellow workman insensible and was fired
forthwith from his job.

Every subterfuge, every trick, every evasion and excuse he could invent
to avoid service in the army, he invented. He simply did not want to be
a soldier. He believed most passionately that the war had been started
with the sole object of affording his enemies opportunities for annoying
him.

Then one day he was sent on a job to an aerodrome workshop. He was a
clever mechanic and he had mastered the intricacies of the engine which
he was to repair, in less than a day.

He went back to his work very thoughtfully, and the next Sunday he
bicycled to the aerodrome in his best clothes and renewed his
acquaintance with the mechanics.

Within a week, he was wearing the double-breasted tunic of the Higher
Life. He was not a good or a tractable recruit. He hated discipline and
regarded his superiors as less than equals--but he was an enthusiast.

When Pangate, which is in the south of England, sent for pilots and
mechanics, he accompanied his officer and flew for the first time in his
life.

In the old days he could not look out of a fourth-floor window without
feeling giddy. Now he flew over England at a height of six thousand
feet, and was sorry when the journey came to an end. In a few months he
was a qualified pilot, and might have received a commission had he so
desired.

"Thank ye, sir-r," he said to the commandant, "but ye ken weel A'm no
gentry. M' fairther was no believer in education, an' whilst ither
laddies were livin' on meal at the University A' was airning ma' salt at
the Govan Iron Wairks. A'm no' a society mon ye ken--A'd be usin' the
wrong knife to eat wi' an' that would bring the coorp into disrepute."

His education had, as a matter of fact, been a remarkable one. From the
time he could read, he had absorbed every boy's book that he could buy
or borrow. He told a friend of mine that when he enlisted he handed to
the care of an acquaintance over six hundred paper-covered volumes which
surveyed the world of adventure, from the Nevada of Deadwood Dick to the
Australia of Jack Harkaway. He knew the stories by heart, their
phraseology and their construction, and was wont at times, half in
earnest, half in dour fun (at his own expense), to satirize every-day
adventures in the romantic language of his favorite authors.

He was regarded as the safest, the most daring, the most venomous of
the scouts--those swift-flying spitfires of the clouds-