the roof, and I am afraid Matilda's
dress suffered a little, but we managed to enter their dug-out. The
place was faintly lighted by a sort of window overlooking the third
hole of the deserted golf course. Our host introduced his wife.

"We were not really nervous," said the lady, "but a fragment of shell
came through the studio window and destroyed a number of my husband's
pictures. He is a painter of the Neo-Impressionistic School."

"What a shame!" said Matilda, taking up a canvas. "May I look? Oh! how
pretty."

"My worst enemy has never called my work that," said the artist.
"Perhaps you would appreciate it better if you held it the other way
up."

It is at a moment like this that my wife shines.

"I should like to see it in a better light," she said. "But how
interesting! Everyone paints now-a-days--even Royalty. My cousin, Sir
Ethelwyn Drewitt, has done some charming water-colours of the family
estates. Perhaps you know him?"

Our host shook his head.

"A very old family, like your own," said Matilda. "Our ancestors
probably knew each other in the days of Stonehenge. I, of course,
recognised the coat-of-arms on your plate."

"I am afraid you are in error," said the artist. "My name is Pitts.
And I don't go back beyond my grandfather, who, honest man, kept a
grocer's shop in Dulwich. The jug you've been admiring I bought in
the Caledonian Cattle Market for fifteen shillings."

Matilda swooned. The air was certainly very close down there.

* * * * *

THE WAR-DREAM.

I Wish I did not dream of France
And spend my nights in mortal dread
On miry flats where whizz-bangs dance
And star-shells hover o'er my head,
And sometimes wake my anxious spouse
By making shrill excited rows
Because it seems a hundred "hows"
Are barraging the bed.

I never fight with tigers now
Or know the old nocturnal mares;
The house on fire, the frantic cow,
The cut-throat coming up the stairs
Would be a treat; I almost miss
That feeling of paralysis
With which one climbed a precipice
Or ran away from bears.

Nor do I dream the pleasant days
That sometimes soothe the worst of wars,
Of omelettes and estaminets
And smiling maids at cottage-doors;
But in a vague unbounded waste
For ever hide with futile haste
From 5.9's precisely placed,
And all the time it pours.

Yet, if I showed colossal phlegm
Or kept e