he saw Miss Biddle and Cedric and Githa arrive breathlessly at the top of the slope. "Honest-Injun," said the man. "But it'll take a good week. Then you'll hear something. If Uncle Gerald's the man I take him for."

They shook hands; Miss Biddle and his cousins were quite close, and he turned to meet them. Their questions and reproaches passed over his head lightly. He didn't care. He had done something at last, and he believed in the likhnè-wālā. "How long is a week?" he asked when the enormity of his conduct had been thoroughly thrashed out.

You are an

"Seven days, of course. ignorant little boy," said Githa.

As it happened, Uncle Gerald was in Burke, so the likhnè-wālā found his home. address, and Ronnie's letter reached him three days later, when he came back from a long day on the moors. There was another letter, also, from the likhnè-wālā, and in it he used the very phrase he had used to Ronnie. "I fear," he said, "the little chap is a misfit, and it's a painful game to play when one is a kiddy. He looked peaked and thin and timid, and he ought to be such a jolly little chap."

He said a great many other things, did the likhnè-wālā, and the name he signed at the end of his letter was one well known to Uncle Gerald as the author of certain books he knew and cared for.

The week dragged on. It rained a lot and the days were long for Ronnie in the seaside lodgings. He kept count of the days, though, and at last it reached the sixth day from the time he met the likhnè-wālā, and no answer had come to his letter. Yet he never doubted him. He was convinced that somehow or other his letter would reach Uncle Gerald.

It was on Monday he had met the likhne-wālā, and on Saturday evening after tea it cleared up, and they went out to the sands. They were to return to Golder's Green next week, and Ronnie dreaded it unspeakably, for he felt that if nothing happened before he did that, then he was indeed abandoned and forlorn. Cedric and Githa would not let him dig with them because his methods were too erratic. Miss Biddle had fin

ished "The Blue Necklace" and started on "Love is a Snare," and found it equally enthralling.

Ronnie was digging by himself, a lonely little figure apart from the rest, and talking to himself as he worked. He had built a bungalow and had just flattened out the compound round about it and was beginning on the servants' quarters, when he looked up to see a solitary figure coming across the ribbed and glistening sand. The tide was out and there seemed miles of beach between him and the sea. They had had their tea extra early, and the beach was almost deserted, for it was just five o'clock. Ronnie watched the distant figure and his heart seemed to jump up and turn over, for there was something dear and familiar about it, and yet . . . he didn't dare to hope.

Then suddenly his long sight told him there was no mistake. It was, it was the Uncle Gerald of his hopes and dreams! He started to run, and the figure made the glad assurance doubly sure by taking off its hat and waving it. Then Ronnie saw the dear, tall forehead that, as he once pointed out to his uncle, "went right over to the back"; after that there could be no mistake.

"I never thought you would come," he said, safe in the shelter of those kind arms, "and if you did I always thought all the dogs would be bound to come, too."

The likhne-wālā was quite right when he said it would not be "overeasy" for Uncle Gerald.

It wasn't.

HE tides of the war were washing up millions of wrecked lives on all the shores; and what mattered the flotsam of a conscripted deep-sea Breton fisherman, slowly pining away for lack of all he was accustomed to; or the jetsam of a tall glass-blower from the "invaded countries," drifted into the hospital-no one quite knew why-prisoner for twenty months with the Boches, released at last because of his half-paralyzed tongueWhat mattered they? What mattered anything, or any one, in days like those? Corporal Mignan, wrinkling a thin, parchmenty face, full of suffering and kindly cynicism, used to call them "mes deux phénomènes." Riddled to the soul by gastritis, he must have found them trying room-mates, with the tricks and manners of sick and naughty children toward a long-suffering nurse. To understand all is to forgive all, they say; but, though he had suffered enough to understand much, Mignan was tempted at times to deliver judgment-for example, when Roche, the Breton fisherman, rose from his bed more than ten times in the night to wander out into the little courtyard of the hospital and look at the stars, because he could not keep still within four walls-so unreasonable of the "type." Or when Gray, the tall glassblower his grandfather had been English-refused with all the tenacity of a British workman, to wear an undervest, with the thermometer below zero, Centigrade.

They inhabited the same room, Flotsam and Jetsam, but never spoke to one another. And yet in all that hospital of French soldiers they were the only two who, in a manner of speaking, had come from England. Fourteen hundred years have passed since the Briton ancestors of

Roche crossed in their shallow boats. Yet he was as hopelessly un-French as a Welshman of the hills is to this day unEnglish. His dark face, shy as a wild animal's, his peat-brown eyes, and the rare, strangely sweet smile that once in a way strayed up into them; his creased brown hands always trying to tie an imaginary cord; the tobacco pouched in his brown cheek; his improperly buttoned blue trousers; his silence eternal as the stars themselves; his habit of climbing trees-all marked him out as no true Frenchman. Indeed, that habit of climbing trees caused every soul who saw him to wonder if he ought to be at large; monkeys alone pursue this pastime. And yet

surely one might understand that trees were for Roche the masts of his far-off fishing barque, each hand-grip on the branch of plane or pine tree, stay to his overmastering hunger for the sea. Up there he would cling, or stand with hands in pockets, and look out, far over the valley and the yellowish gray-pink of the pantiled town roofs, a mile away, far into the mountains where snow melted not, far over this foreign land of "midi trois quarts," to an imagined Breton coast and the seas that roll from there to Cape Breton where the cod are. Since he never spoke unless spoken to-no, not onceit was impossible for his landsmen comrades to realize why he got up those trees, and they would summon each other to observe this "phénomène," this human orang-outang, who had not their habit of keeping firm earth beneath their feet. They understood his other eccentricities better: For instance, he could not stay still even at his meals, but must get up and slip out, because he chewed tobacco, and, since the hospital regulations forbade his spitting on the floor, he must naturally go and spit outside. For "ces typeslà" to chew and drink was-life! To the

presence of tobacco in the cheek and the absence of drink from the stomach they attributed all his un-French ways, save just that mysterious one of climbing trees. And Gray-though only one-fourth English-how utterly British was that "arrogant civilian" as the "poilus" called him. Even his clothes, somehow, were British-no one knew who had given them to him; his short gray workman's jacket, brown dingy trousers, muffler, and checked cap; his long, idle walk, his absolute sans-gêne, regardless of any one but himself; his tall, loose figure, with a sort of grace lurking somewhere in its slow, wandering movements, and long, thin fingers. That wambling, independent form might surely be seen any day outside a thousand British public houses, in time of peace. His face, with its dust-colored hair, projecting ears, gray eyes with something of the child in them, and something of the mule, and something of a soul trying to wander out of the forest of misfortune; his little, tip-tilted nose that never grew on pure-blooded Frenchman; under a scant moustache his thick lips, disfigured by infirmity of speech, whence passed so continually a dribble of salivaSick British workman was stamped on him. Yet he was passionately fond of washing himself, his teeth, his head, his clothes. Into the frigid winter he would go, and stand at the "Source" half an hour at a time, washing and washing. It was a cause of constant irritation to Mignan that his "phénomène" would never come to time, on account of this disastrous habit; the hospital corridors resounded almost daily with the importuning of those shapeless lips for something clean-a shirt, a pair of drawers, a bath, a

handkerchief. He had a fixity of purpose; not too much purpose, but so fixed -Yes, he was English!

For "les deux phénomènes" the soldiers, the servants, and the "Powers" of the hospital-all were sorry; yet they could not understand to the point of quite forgiving their vagaries. The twain were outcast, wandering each in a dumb world. of his own, each in the endless circle of

one or two hopeless notions. It was irony or the French systemthat had ordered the Breton Roche to get well in a place whence he could see nothing flatter than a mountain, smell no sea, eat no fish And God knows what had sent Gray there. His story was too vaguely understood, for his stumbling speech simply could not make it plain. "Les Boches-ils vont en payer cher-les Boches," muttered fifty times a day,

was the burden of his song. Those Boches had come into his village early in the war, torn him from his wife and his "petite fille." Since then he had "had fear," been hungry, been cold, eaten grass; eyeing some fat little dog, he would leer and mutter: "J'ai mangé cela, c'est bon !" and with fierce triumph add: "Ils ont faim, les Boches !" The "arrogant civilian" had never done his military service, for his infirmity, it seemed, had begun before the war.

Dumb, each in his own way, and differing in every mortal thing except the reality of their misfortunes, never were two beings more lonely. Their quasi-nurse, Corporal Mignan, was no doubt right in his estimate of their characters. For him, so patient in the wintry days with his "deux phénomènes," they were divested of all that halo which misfortune sets round

the heads of the afflicted. He had too much to do with them, and saw them as they would have been if undogged by Fate. Of Roche he would say: "Il n'est pas mon rêve. Je n'aime pas ces types taci-turnes; quand même, il n'est pas mauvais. Il est marin-les marins-!" and he would shrug his shoulders, as who should say: "Those poor devils-what can you expect?" "Mais ce Gray"-it was one bit ter day when Gray had refused absolutely to wear his greatcoat during a motor-drive -"c'est un mauvais type ! Il est malin― il sait très bien ce qu'il veut. C'est un égoiste !" An egoist! Poor Gray! No doubt he was instinctively conscious that if he did not make the most of what little personality was left within his wandering form, it would slip and he would be no more. Even a winter fly is mysteriously anxious not to become dead. That he was "malin”—cunning-became the accepted view about Gray; not so malin that he could "cut three paws off a duck" as the old gray Territorial, grand père Poirot, would put it, but malin enough to know very well what he wanted and how, by sticking to his demand, to get it. Mignan, typically French, did not allow enough for the essential Englishman in Gray. Besides, one must be malin if one has only the power to say about one-tenth of what one wants, and then not be understood once in twenty times. Gray did not like his greatcoat-a fine old French-blue military thing with brass buttons-the arrogant civilian would have none of it! It was easier to shift the Boches on the Western front than to shift an idea, once in his head. In the poor soil of his soul the following plants of thought alone now flourished: Hatred of the Boches; love of English tobacco-"Il est bon-il est bon !" he would say, tapping his Virginian cigarette; the wish to see again his "petite fille"; to wash himself; to drink a "café natur" and bottled beer every day after the midday meal; and to go to Lyons to see his uncle and work for his living. And who shall say that any of these idées fixes were evil in him?

But back to Flotsam, whose idée fixe was Brittany! Nostalgia is a long word, and a malady from which the English do not suffer badly, for they carry their country on their backs, walk the world in

a cloud of their own atmosphere, making that world England. The French have eyes to see; and, not surrounded by houses that have flatness, shutters, and subtle coloring-yellowish, French-gray, Frenchgreen; by cafés, plane-trees, Frenchwomen, scents of wood-smoke and coffee roasted in the streets; by the wines, and infusions of the herbs of France; by the churches of France and the beautiful, silly chiming of their bells-when not surrounded by all these, they know it, feel it, suffer. But even they do not suffer so dumbly and instinctively, so like a wild · animal caged, as that Breton fisherman, caged up in a world of hill and valleynot the world as he had known it. They called his case "shell-shock"-for the French system would not send a man to convalescence for anything so essentially civilian as homesickness, even when it had taken a claustrophobic turn. A system recognizes only causes that you can see: holes in the head, ham-strung legs, frost-bitten feet, with other of the legitimate consequences of war. But it was not shell-shock. Roche was really possessed by the feeling that he would never get out, never get home, never smell fish and the sea, watch the green breakers roll in on his native shore, the sun gleaming through wave-crests lifted and flying back in spray, never know the accustomed heave and roll under his feet, or carouse in a seaport cabaret, or see his old mother, la veuve Roche. And after all there was a certain foundation for his fear. It was not as if this war could be expected to stop some day. There they were in the trenches, they and the enemy set over against each other "like china dogs," in the words of grand père Poirot; and there they would be, so far as Roche's ungeared nerves could grasp, forever. And, while like china dogs they sat, he knew that he would not be released, not allowed to go back to the sea and the smells and the sounds thereof; for he had still all his limbs, and no bullet-hole to show under his thick dark hair. No wonder he got up the trees and looked out for sight of the waves, and fluttered the weak nerves of the hospital "Powers," till they saw themselves burying him with a broken spine, at the expense of the subscribers. Nothing to be done for the poor fellow, except to