d upon all but Captain Ellis and myself. Nothing was too good for
us, and to the accompaniment of numerous cups of coffee, brought by
Norah, we talked away till ten o'clock. Both the landlord and his wife
walked out to our car with us, and continued to offer their regrets
for the treatment which we had received.

By the time we got "home" we were fairly cooled off, and we went to
bed that night with the proud feeling that we had saved the name of
Canada.

Another time "things went wrong" was one Saturday afternoon when we
took a half-day off. It was not that we needed the holiday from
overwork, because, for two weeks, three of the four of us had been
doing nothing. The fourth man, a captain of Highland descent, had,
unlike the rest of us, really been working hard. Yet we all needed the
holiday, for loafing anywhere is usually the hardest work in the
world; but loafing on the edge of Salisbury Plain with little to see
was work even harder than the hardest. Napoleon is said to have
remarked that "war is made up of short periods of intense activity
followed by much longer periods of enforced idleness" or something to
that effect. Of the "intense activity" of war we as yet had had no
experience but with "enforced idleness," we were all too distressingly
familiar. In civilian life we had been very busy men; and here we had
been plunged into a world where for months at a time there was almost
nothing to do--and what was worse, there was no place to go to and
forget about it.

So, after a hard two-week's work doing nothing, we studied the map and
decided that the sea was within easy range of our four-cylinder
thirty. Accordingly we struck out for the sea, followed the track of
the little river Avon, which flows past Salisbury Plain, through
Amesbury and the ancient city of Salisbury and empties into the
British channel at Christchurch.

It was a glorious March afternoon, with intervals of brilliant
sunshine; the roads were good, and we rolled along through the little
English villages with their thatched-roofs, at a speed which quickly
brought us to the New Forest. All of a sudden a strange, familiar tang
in the air thrilled us. Every man sat instantly erect and gulped down,
in wonderment at his own action, a succession of great, deep
satisfying breaths: And then the explanation broke from two of us at
the same moment, "Canada!" It was the familiar Canadian smell of the
autumn forest fires that had for the moment penetrate