ries on the _qui vive_.

How Oswald existed is a mystery--probably on manna, for he toiled not
neither span, and if he stole for a living it was not from us.

He spent his mornings in bed, his afternoons reclining on the bank
behind his residence, puffing at his dudheen and watching our recruits
going through the hoops with the amused contempt that a gentleman of
leisure naturally feels for the working classes.

At the end of September, Freddy, the Benedick, finding himself in the
orderly-room and forgetting what had brought him there, applied for
leave as a matter of habit, and, walking out again, promptly forgot
all about it. Freddy is given that way. Apparently the Orderly Room
was finding time heavy on their hands that morning, for machinery was
set in motion, and in due course the astonished Freddy discovered
himself with permission to go to blazes for seven days and a warrant
to London in his pocket.

He capered whooping home to his villa, told Mrs. Freddy to pack her
toothbrush and come along, and the mail bore them hence. Next day the
weather broke, the sky turned upside down and emptied itself upon us,
the parade ground squelched if you trod on it, the gutters failed to
cope with the rush of business, and the roads ran in spate.

The post-orderly, splashing back to barracks, reported the
disappearance of Oswald and Co.

We determined that they must have been washed out to sea and pictured
them astride the wigwam in a beam-roll off Kinsale, keeping a watchful
eye for U-boats.

We had seven days of unrelieved downpour. On the morning of the
eighth, Freddy and wife returned from leave, and, opening the front
door of the villa--which they discovered they had forgotten to lock in
the delirium of their departure--stepped within. At the same moment,
Oswald, the hairy dog and the woolly donkey heard the call of the
great spaces, and, opening the back door of the villa, stepped without
and departed for haunts unknown.

Freddy in a high state of excitement came over to the Mess and told us
all about it.

He himself had been all for slaying Oswald on the spot, he said, but
Mrs. Freddy wouldn't hear of it.

"She says he hasn't stolen anything," Freddy explained. "She says he
was only _staying_ with us, in a manner of speaking, and was quite
right to take his poor old dog and donkey under cover during that
rotten weather, she says--so that's the end of it."

But it wasn't the end of it; Freddy had reckoned wit