sh came.

'Look at the Navy!' he said. I looked.

The cynic slept like a child. His face was very calm and
intensely optimistic. 'He told me he had slept through big guns'
fire on his ship,' I said admiringly. 'He has great powers.'

A curious lingering flash came. It played round the sleeper's
head. A huge peal seemed to come almost with it, the last huge
peal ere that brief passionate storm withdrew.

Then the sleeper began to talk.

He talked too well too well for me to mix his actual phrases up
with this secular story.

The Intelligence man began to laugh. The thing struck him as
funny. But suddenly I caught familiar words, and I put my finger
on my lips. My host's black eyes looked into mine, and I saw, as
I had never seen before, how much there was in them. First they
kindled, and then they grew soft, and he turned his head away.
The sleeper had been repeating the end of the fifth chapter of S.
Matthew the bit about the God (whose sons we Christians are) that
makes His sun to shine, and His rain to fall so impartially.

He said the words very clearly, as articulately as if he were a
child saying repetition. What made our host's eyes melt so
curiously was what came after.

The sleeper said a sort of child's prayer about sun and rain, and
just and unjust, and good and evil, praying quite simply to God
to bless everybody and to do the best for them English and
Germans, black men and white.

'Yes, and my boy,' he said, as if that petition furnished a sort
of limit to the mercy he invoked. 'And the mtoto,' he added a
minute after.

'What's his name?' he asked innocently. He had forgotten the name
of his boy's apprentice, and his forgetfulness was on his mind.

The strain was a bit too much for us when it came to that
question.

We laughed rather hysterically. Then we pulled ourselves
together, but we had not disturbed him. He spoke no more save for
two or three detached words proper names I think. But he breathed
long breaths peacefully.

The dawn was quite near on its way now. A dove called from the
wood to its mate. Surely it desired to tell it that morning came.

'We've got some fresh Intelligence,' my host said gravely.

'Pentecostal Illumination, rather,' I said.

'Did you happen to remember what the Day was?'

He nodded. 'We'd better not sit up talking,' he told me. 'It
might seem to spoil it somehow. We'd better try to get a little
sleep. Come over here out of the ants.'

So we shifted