ied in,' remarked Mrs.
Harvey-Browne, while Brosy, with the skill of one used to doing it, made
the tea; and then according to the wont of good women when they speak of
being buried, she sighed. 'I wonder,' she went on, 'how he came to be
put here.'

'That is what I have been wondering ever since I found him,' I said.

'He was wounded in some battle and was trying to get home,' said Brosy.
'You know Finland was Swedish in those days, and so was Ruegen.'

As I did not know I said nothing, but looked exceedingly bright.

'He had been fighting for Sweden against the French. I met a forester
yesterday, and he told me there used to be a forester's house where
those fruit trees are, and the people in it took him in and nursed him
till he died. Then they buried him here.'

'But why was he not buried in a churchyard?' asked his mother.

'I don't know. Poor chap, I don't suppose he would have cared. The great
point I should say under such circumstances would be the being dead.'

'My dear Brosy,' murmured his mother; which was what she always murmured
when he said things that she disapproved without quite knowing why.

'Or a still greater point,' I remarked, moved again to cheerful speech
by the excellent tea Brosy had made, and his mother, justly suspicious
of the tea of Teutons, had smuggled through the customs, as she
afterwards told me with pride,--'a still greater point if those are the
circumstances that lie in wait for one, would be the never being born.'

'Oh but that is pessimism!' cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne, shaking a finger
at me. 'What have you, of all people in the world, to do with
pessimism?'

'Oh I don't know--I suppose I have my days, like everybody else,' I
said, slightly puzzled again by this remark. 'Once I was told of two
aged Germans,' I continued, for by this time I had had three rusks and
was feeling very pleasant,--'of two aged Germans whose digestive
machinery was fragile.'

'Oh, poor things,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne sympathetically.

'And in spite of that they drank beer all their lives persistently and
excessively.'

'How very injudicious,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne.

'They drank such a fearful lot and for so long that at last they became
philosophers.'

'My dear Frau X.,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne incredulously, 'what an
unexpected result.'

'Oh but indeed there is hardly anything you may not at last become,' I
insisted, 'if besides being German your diet is indiscreet enough.'

'Yes, I