endish, stretched out by his side, "just listen
to him!"

"I suppose you'll say you sucked honey out of the shells," remarked
Doggie.

"I'm no great hand at mixing metaphors----"

"What about drinks?" asked Mo.

"Nor drinks either," replied McPhail. "Both are bad for the brain. But
as to what you were saying, laddie, I'll not deny that I've derived
considerable interest and amusement from a bombardment. Yet it has its
sad aspect." He paused for a moment or two. "Man," he continued, "what
an awful waste of money!"

"I don't know what old Mac is jawing about," said Mo Shendish, "but
you can take it from me he's a holy terror with the bayonet. One
moment he's talking to a Boche through his hat and the next the Boche
is wriggling like a worm on a bent pin."

Mo winked at Phineas. The temptation to "tell the tale" to the
new-comer was too strong.

Doggie grew very serious. "You've been killing men--like that?"

"Thousands, laddie," replied Phineas, the picture of unboastful
veracity. "And so has Mo."

Mo Shendish, helmeted, browned, dried, toughened, a very different Mo
from the pallid ferret whom Aggie had driven into the ranks of war,
hunched himself up, his hands clasping his knees.

"I don't mind doing it, when you're so excited you don't know where
you are," said he, "but I don't like thinking of it afterwards."

As a matter of fact, he had only once got home with the bayonet and
the memory was unpleasant.

"But you've just thought of it," said Phineas.

"It was you, not me," said Mo. "That makes all the difference."

"It's astonishing," Phineas remarked sententiously, "how many people
not only refuse to catch pleasure as it flies, but spurn it when it
sits up and begs at them. Laddie," he turned to Doggie, "the more one
wallows in hedonism, the more one realizes its unplumbed depths."

A little girl of ten, neatly pigtailed but piteously shod, came near
and cast a child's envious eye on Doggie's bread and jam.

"Approach, my little one," Phineas cried in French words but with the
accent of Sauchiehall Street. "If I gave you a franc, what would you
do with it?"

"I should buy nourishment (_de la nourriture_) for _maman_."

"Lend me a franc, laddie," said McPhail, and when Doggie had slipped
the coin into his palm, he addressed the child in unintelligible
grandiloquence and sent her on her way mystified but rejoicing. _Ces
bons droles d'Anglais!_

"Ah, laddie!" cried Phineas, stretching himself o