'I wanted to be sure of that. I must go now. I've-I've an appointment.' And he left me.

Had not my eyes been held I might have known that that broken muttering over the fire was the swan-song of Charlie Mears. But I thought it the prelude to fuller revelation. At last and at last I should cheat the Lords of Life and Death!

When next Charlie came to me I received him with rapture. He was nervous and embarrassed, but his eyes were very full of light, and his lips a little parted.

'I've done a poem,' he said; and then, quickly: 'it's the best I've ever done. Read it.' He thrust it into my hand and retreated to the window.

I groaned inwardly. It would be the work of half an hour to criticise-that is to say praise-the poem sufficiently to please Charlie. Then I had good reason to groan, for Charlie, discarding his favourite centipede metres, had launched into shorter and choppier verse, and verse with a motive at the back of it. This is what I read :

The day is most fair, the cheery wind

Halloos behind the hill

Where he bends the wood as seemeth good,

And the sapling to his will!

Riot O wind; there is that in my blood
That would not have thee still!

'She gave me herself, O Earth, O Sky;
Gray sea, she is mine alone!
Let the sullen boulders hear my cry,
And rejoice tho' they be but stone!

'Mine! I have won her, O good brown earth,

Make merry! 'Tis hard on Spring;
Make merry; my love is doubly worth

All worship your fields can bring!
Let the hind that tills you feel my mirth
At the early harrowing.'

'Yes, it's the early harrowing, past a doubt,' I said, with a dread at my heart. Charlie smiled, but did not answer.

'Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad;
I am victor. Greet me, O Sun,
Dominant master and absolute lord

Over the soul of one!'

'Well?' said Charlie, looking over my shoulder.

I thought it far from well, and very evil indeed, when he silently laid a photograph on the paper— the photograph of a girl with a curly head, and a foolish slack mouth.

"Isn't it isn't it wonderful?' he whispered, pink to the tips of his ears, wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. 'I didn't know; I didn't think-it came like a thunderclap.'

'Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie ?"

"My God-she-she loves me!' He sat down repeating the last words to himself. I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already bowed by desk-work, and wondered when, where, and how he had loved in his past lives.

'What will your mother say?' I asked cheerfully.

'I don't care a damn what she says.'

At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should, properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told him this gently; and he described Her, even as Adam must have described to the newly-named beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve. Incidentally I learned that She was a tobacconist's assistant with a weakness for pretty dress, and had told him four or five times already that She had never been kissed by a man before.

Charlie spoke on and on, and on; while I, separated from him by thousands of years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully behind us. It is that we may not remember our first and most beautiful wooings. Were it not so, our world would be without inhabitants in a hundred years.

'Now, about that galley-story,' I said still more cheerfully, in a pause in the rush of the speech. Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. 'The galley-what galley? Good heavens, don't You don't know how

joke, man! This is serious! serious it is!'

Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that kills remembrance, and the finest story in the world would never be written.

HIS PRIVATE HONOUR.

THE autumn batch of recruits for the Old Regiment had just been uncarted. As usual they were Isaid to be the worst draft that had ever come from the Depôt. Mulvaney looked them over, grunted scornfully, and immediately reported himself very sick.

'Is it the regular autumn fever?' said the doctor, who knew something of Terence's ways. 'Your temperature's normal.'

"Tis a hundred and thirty-seven rookies to the bad, sorr. I'm not very sick now, but I will be dead if these boys are thrown at me in my rejuced condition. Doctor, dear, supposin' you was in charge of three cholera camps an'

'Go to hospital then, you old contriver,' said the doctor laughing.

Terence bundled himself into a blue bedgown,Dinah Shadd was away attending to a major's lady, who preferred Dinah without a diploma to anybody else with a hundred-put a pipe in his teeth, and paraded the hospital balcony exhorting Ortheris to be a father to the new recruits.

Copyright, 1891, by Macmillan & Co.

'They're mostly your own sort, little man,' he said with a grin; 'the top-spit av Whitechapel. I'll interogue them whin they're more like something they niver will be,-an' that's a good honist soldier like me.'

Ortheris yapped indignantly. He knew as well as Terence what the coming work meant, and he thought Terence's conduct mean. Then he strolled off to look at the new cattle, who were staring at the unfamiliar landscape with large eyes, and asking if the kites were eagles and the pariah-dogs jackals.

‘Well, you are a holy set of bean-faced beggars, you are,' he said genially to a knot in the barrack square. Then running his eye over them,—' Fried fish an' whelks is about your sort. Blimy if they haven't sent some pink-eyed Jews too. You chap with the greasy 'ed, which o' the Solomons was your father, Moses ?'

"My name's Anderson,' said a voice sullenly.

'Oh, Samuelson! All right, Samuelson! An' how many o' the likes o' you Sheenies are comin' to spoil B. Company?'

There is no scorn so complete as that of the old soldier for the new. It is right that this should be so. A recruit must learn first that he is not a man but a thing, which in time, and by the mercy of Heaven, may develop into a soldier of the Queen if it takes care and attends to good advice. Ortheris's tunic was open, his cap overlopped one eye, and his hands were