e as if he was in
his foreign fastnesses.

The enemy seemed to read Oswald's thoughts with deadly unerringness. He
said--

'The English are somewhere over on the other side of the hill. They are
trying to keep us out of Maidstone.'

After this our plan of mingling with the troops did not seem worth going
on with. This soldier, in spite of his unerringness in reading Oswald's
innermost heart, seemed not so very sharp in other things, or he would
never have given away his secret plans like this, for he must have
known from our accents that we were Britons to the backbone. Or perhaps
(Oswald thought this, and it made his blood at once boil and freeze,
which our uncle had told us was possible, but only in India), perhaps he
thought that Maidstone was already as good as taken and it didn't matter
what he said. While Oswald was debating within his intellect what to
say next, and how to say it so as to discover as many as possible of the
enemy's dark secrets, Noel said--

'How did you get here? You weren't here yesterday at tea-time.'

The soldier gave the pot another sandy rub, and said--

'I daresay it does seem quick work--the camp seems as if it had sprung
up in the night, doesn't it?--like a mushroom.'

Alice and Oswald looked at each other, and then at the rest of us. The
words 'sprung up in the night' seemed to touch a string in every heart.

'You see,' whispered Noel, 'he won't tell us how he came here. NOW, is
it humbug or history?'

Oswald, after whisperedly requesting his young brother to dry up and not
bother, remarked, 'Then you're an invading army?'

'Well,' said the soldier, 'we're a skeleton battalion, as a matter of
fact, but we're invading all right enough.'

And now indeed the blood of the stupidest of us froze, just as the
quick-witted Oswald's had done earlier in the interview. Even H. O.
opened his mouth and went the colour of mottled soap; he is so fat that
this is the nearest he can go to turning pale. Denny said, 'But you
don't look like skeletons.'

The soldier stared, then he laughed and said, 'Ah, that's the padding in
our tunics. You should see us in the grey dawn taking our morning bath
in a bucket.' It was a dreadful picture for the imagination. A skeleton,
with its bones all loose most likely, bathing anyhow in a pail. There
was a silence while we thought it over.

Now, ever since the cleaning-cauldron soldier had said that about taking
Maidstone, Alice had kept on pulling at Osw