s far as the officer was concerned, kindness had its own
reward; and here again was a case of an apparently useless man, when
his hour had struck, arising to the supreme heights of self-sacrifice.

_Dirty Jock._

You can't always tell the real worth of any man to the army. Some men,
who are efficient and valuable, in times of quiet, are not able to
stand up in the gruelling of a battle; while other men, ordinarily
useless and difficult to handle, will develop wonderful initiative,
resourcefulness, and daring under stress or emergency. The quality of
heroism may be surrounded by the most unlikely exterior--but at the
supreme moment the hero in every man will come out and he may
surprise us by rising to undreamed heights of self-sacrifice.

Jock Smith was a nuisance to the whole regiment; he was a constant
reproach to the Colonel, the Medical officer and everybody else. The
very day his regiment landed in England he got gloriously drunk and it
was only by the simple but very certain method of prodding him with
the point of a bayonet in the immediate rear that he was kept from
falling out of the ranks and going to sleep on the roadside.

"I didna know ye were gaun ta march the nicht oor I wudna hae got
drunk," he apologized.--So it was always. Smith was dirty. Smith was
troublesome. Smith, in short, could have well been done without. So
dirty did he become, in fact, and so verminous, that his medical
officer ordered that he be given a bath; and the order was carried out
by a squad of four husky Tommies with a considerable amount of
enthusiasm on the part of the squad and a tremendous amount of
profanity on the part of Smith.

One bright day "a show was pulled off." Like the rest of the
battalion, Smith was in it. As they went over the parapet with the
cheer that the Germans have learned to know and dread, Smith was well
up in the van. He did his part with an enthusiasm that was a credit to
his brigade. An officer passing through a captured trench found Smith
in a quandary with three prisoners backed up against the wall. "Come
along" cried the officer, "leave those men for somebody else." An hour
later Jock walked into the dressing station wounded. "Well, what is
the matter with you?" said the M.O., looking up from his work of
bandaging the wounded. "I think am hit, Doctor," he answered, and he
was, for a great chunk of flesh had actually been blown out of his
thigh.

About that time the officer of the trench episo