One month travelling snugly in a G.S. waggon (you never catch him marching like an honest mascot), the next “swinging the lead” in some warm dug-out—­there are few moves on the board of the great War game that he does not know.  He will patronise a score of regiments in three months; travel from one end of the Western Front to the other and back again, taking care never to attempt to renew an old acquaintance.  Occasionally he makes the mistake of running across a mitrailleuse battery with its dog-teams needing reinforcements, or tries to billet himself on a military pigeon-loft and meets a violent death.  But whatever fortune may bring him we can confidently assert that he is much too fly to chance his luck across the border and into the land where the sausage-machines guard the secret of perpetual motion.

* * * * *

IN WILD WALES.

  Dwarfing the town that to the hillside clings
    On terraced slopes, the castle, nobly planned
  And noble in its ruined greatness, flings
    Its double challenge to the sea and land.

  Oh, if the ancient spirit of the place
    Could win free utterance in articulate tones,
  What tales to hearten and inspire and brace
    Would issue from these grey and lichened stones!

  Once manned and held by paladin and peer,
    Now tenanted by jackdaws, bats and owls,
  Save when the casual tourist through its drear
    And grass-grown courts disconsolately prowls.

  Once famous as the scene of Border fights,
    Now watching, in the greatest war of all,
  Old men, with their bilingual acolytes,
    Beating, outside its gates, a little ball;

  While on the crumbling battlements on high,
    Where mail-clad men-at-arms kept watch and ward,
  Adventurous sheep amaze the curious eye
    Instead of grazing on the level sward.

  But though such incongruities may jar
    The sense of fitness in a mind fastidious,
  Modernity has wholly failed to mar
    The face of Nature here, or make it hideous.

  Inland the amphitheatre of hills
    Sweeps round with Snowdon as their central crest,
  And murmurs of innumerable rills
    Blend with the heaving of the ocean’s breast.

  Already Autumn’s fiery finger laid
    On heath and marsh and woodland far and wide
  In all their gorgeous pageantry has arrayed
    The tranquil beauties of the countryside.

  Here every prospect pleases, and the spot,
    Unspoilt, unvulgarised by man, remains,
  Thanks largely to a System which has not
    Accelerated or improved its trains.

  Yet even here, amid untroubled ways,
    Far from the city’s fevered, tainted breath,
  Yon distant plume of yellow smoke betrays
    The ceaseless labours of the mills of death.

* * * * *

“William Arthur Fletcher, ship’s apprentice, of South Shields, was remanded for a week on a charge of being absent from his ship.  His captain alleged that he had found Fletcher asleep on the bridge.”—­Daily Dispatch.

It must have been his mind that was absent.