ans.
It's the weans that pull at my heart-strings."

And he turned on his heel and walked rapidly back across the bridge.

Under the lamp-post stood the roadman and the beadle, looking after
him. I spoke to them, for since the war began we all speak to each
other in our parish.

"Has he forgotten ony thin'?" asked the roadman, waving a hand towards
the retreating form of the ticket-collector.

"I don't think so," I answered, "he just said that he was going to be
tee-total till the end of the war."

"Tee-total!" echoed the roadman mournfully; "there gangs anither lost
soul!"

My two friends went sadly down the steep brae, and I turned up the long
flight of stone steps that leads to the road above. On the top of the
first flight I turned and looked after them. When they came opposite
the door of the village inn, they slowed down ... and then went
resolutely past, down into the hollow. The two of them have probably
resolved to join the company of the "lost souls."

***

I have read the ticket-collector's pamphlet, and I feel a little dazed.
It is such an odd world, and the strange thing is that I never realised
its queerness before. A Grand Duke is murdered in a place of which I
never heard before, and whose name I cannot even now trust myself to
write down correctly, and here, a thousand miles away, the result is
that I am brought face to face for the first time with the problem that
lay twice a day under my feet--the problem of the Cities of the Plain.
A flood of light seems to have fallen on things which were aforetime
hazy. Events stand out luridly and arrestingly. Here is one. I was
in a far Hebridean isle when war broke out. All of a sudden there
sounded the drum,

"Saying Come,
Freemen, come,
Ere your heritage be wasted! said the
quick alarming drum."

And the manhood of the island sprang to their feet. Mothers gave their
sons, sending them away with sobs and tears, but in the name of God.

On a drizzling morning the little steamer lay at the pier, crowded with
men and horses, going out to fight and die. The hawsers were loosed.
The steamer churned and backed and crept away. A girl stood near me
crying softly. A youth with clean-cut features, and the yearning no
tongue can utter shining in his eyes, leant over the taffrail and
called to her, "Not crying, Jessie?" And she wiped her cheek with the
moist handkerchief, and turned a smiling face to him and said, "No, I
a