?" I asked.

"Nay, sodgers i' t' hospital. Poor lads, they're sadly begone for want
o' a sup o' milk. I can see 'em i' their beds i' them gert wards, and
there's country lads amang 'em that knows all about cows an' plooin'.
Their faces are as lang as a wet week when they think on that they've
lossen an arm or a leg, an' will niver milk nor ploo no more. Eh! but
I'm fain to milk for t' sodgers."

"But how can you be sure that the right people get your milk?" I asked
at last.

She did not answer at once, and I knew that she was wondering at my
stupidity, and considering how best she could make me understand. But
she could find no words to bring home to my intelligence the confidence
that was hers. All that she could say was: "It mun be so."

"It mun be so." At first I thought it was just the usual game of
make-believe in which children love to indulge. But it was much more
than this, and the simple words were an expression of her sure faith
that what she willed must come to pass. "It mun be so." Why not? "If ye
have faith, and shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be
thou cast into the sea, it shall be done."

THE INNER VOICE

Fear is a resourceful demon, with whom we are engaged in perpetual
conflict from the cradle to the grave. Fear assumes many forms, and has
always a shrewd eye for the joints in that armour of courage and
confidence which we put on in self-defence. One man conquers fear of
danger only to fall a prey to fear of public opinion; another succumbs
to superstitious fear, while a third, steadfast against all these, comes
under the thraldom of the most insidious and malign of all forms of
fear--the fear of death.

The power of fear has of late been forcibly impressed on my mind by
hearing from his own lips the story of my friend, Job Hesketh. Six
months ago I should have said that Job was entirely unconscious of fear.
I have never known a man so good-humouredly indifferent to public
opinion. "Say what thou thinks and do what thou says" was the golden
rule upon which he acted, and which he commended to others.
Superstition, in its myriad forms, was for him a lifelong jest. Thirteen
people at table had never been known to take the keen edge off his
Yorkshire appetite, and he liked to make fun of his friends' dread of
ghosts, witches and "gabbleratchets." Nothing pleased him better than to
stroll of an evening round the nearest cemetery, and he had often been
heard to declare: "I'd