jor's
voice arrested him.

"Sir, on behalf of the sergeants, I thank you for coming in and I thank
you for your words. You have done us all good."

The following morning, a sergeant from a neighbouring battalion,
visiting the transport lines, and observing Barry passing along with
Major Bayne on the battalion parade ground, took occasion to remark:

"That is your padre, ain't it? He checks you fellows up rather short,
don't he?"

"Yes, that is our padre, or Pilot, as we like to call him," was Sergeant
Mackay's answer, "but I want to tell you that he can just check us up
until our heads touch the crupper, and it's nobody's damned business but
our own."

"Well, you needn't get so blasted hot over it. I ain't said nothing
against your padre that I haven't heard from your own fellows."

"That's all right, sergeant. That was before we got to the war. I'm not
huntin' for any trouble with anybody, but if any one wants to start up
anything with any one, sergeant, in this battalion, he knows how to do
it."

And this came to be recognised as an article in the creed of the
sergeant's mess.

The bayonet-fighting squad were engaged in some preliminary drill of
the more ordinary kind when Major Bayne and the chaplain arrived on the
ground.

"We'll just watch the little beggar a while from here and go up later,"
said the major.

As Barry watched the drill sergeant on his job, it seemed to him that
he had never seen a soldier work before. In figure, in pose, in action
there was a perfection about him that awakened at once admiration and
envy. Below the average height, yet not insignificant, erect, without
exaggeration, precise in movement without angularity, swift in action
without haste, he was indeed a joy to behold.

"Now, did you ever see anything like that?" enquired the major, after
their eyes had followed the evolutions of the drill sergeant for a time.

"Never," said Barry, "nor do I hope to again. He is a--I was going to
say dream, but he's no dream. He's much too wide awake for that. He's a
poem; that's what he is."

Back and forth, about and around, stepped the little drill sergeant,
a finished example of precise, graceful movement. He was explaining in
clean cut, and evidently memorised speech the details of the movements
he wished executed, but through his more formal and memorised vocabulary
his native cockney would occasionally erupt, adding vastly to the
pungency and picturesqueness of his speech.

"