nothing
came amiss. And he described himself as stronger than ever, and poured
scorn on the medical wiseacre who had tried to refuse him.

'All the same,' sighed Hannah, 'I do hope they will just be used to
guard the lines of communication.' She was full of war-knowledge
acquired with painful eagerness, prattled of Basuto ponies and Mauser
bullets, pontoons and pom-poms, knew the exact position of the armies,
and marked her war-map with coloured pins.

Simon, too, had developed quite a literary talent under the pressure
of so much vivid new life, and from his cheery letters she learned
much that was not in the papers, especially in those tense days when
the C.I.V.'S did at last get to the front--and remained there: tales
of horses mercifully shot, and sheep mercilessly poisoned, and oxen
dropping dead as they dragged the convoys; tales of muddle and
accident, tales of British soldiers slain by their own protective
cannon as they lay behind ant-heaps facing the enemy, and British
officers culled under the very eyes of the polo-match; tales of
hospital and camp, of shirts turned sable and putties worn to rags,
and all the hidden miseries of uncleanliness and insanitation that
underlie the glories of war. There were tales, too, of quarter-rations;
but these she did not read to her husband, lest the mention of
'bully-beef' should remind him of how his son must be eating forbidden
food. Once, even, two fat pigs were captured at a hungry moment for the
battalion. But there came a day when S. Cohn seized those letters and
read them first. He began to speak of his boy at the war--nay, to read
the letters to enthralled groups in the synagogue lobby--groups that
swallowed without reproach the _tripha_ meat cooked in Simon's
mess-tin.

It was like being _Gabbai_ over again.

Moreover, Simon's view of the Boer was so strictly orthodox as to give
almost religious satisfaction to the proud parent. 'A canting
hypocrite, a psalm-singer and devil-dodger, he has no civilization
worth the name, and his customs are filthy. Since the great trek he
has acquired, from long intercourse with his Kaffir slaves, many of
the native's savage traits. In short, a born liar, credulous and
barbarous, crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn.'

'Crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn,' repeated S. Cohn,
pausing impressively. 'Haven't I always said that? The boy only bears
out what I knew without going there. But hear further! "Is it to be