The Squire smiled.

“I don’t think I should worry.  Amongst all your Unexpected Explosives do you happen to condescend to have heard of the gentle horse-chestnut and the school-children that collect them?  Here are the two delinquents I wrote to you about, and we’ve caught them in the act.  Just look at them wasting the precious things.”

Two small boys were playing at conkers, two small boys with very earnest faces and grubby clothes which never figured in KATE GREENAWAY’S pictures, wasting precious material which five-and-thirty other scholars were diligently collecting and stuffing into sacks.  I ought to have given them a lecture on patriotism—­the army behind the Army.  But we each of us keep one childish passion untamed, even if we are unromantic old bachelors, and I, His Majesty’s Deputy Assistant Acting Inspector for All Sorts of Unexpected Explosives and his very loyal subject, who have lived for nearly half-a-century of Octobers in London town—­I borrowed the bigger conker and systematically and in deadly earnest I fought and defeated the other small boy.

They say that treason never succeeds; so perhaps I can’t be a traitor after all.

* * * * *

THE UNDISMAYED.

In a world of insecurity and change it is good to have one bedrock certainty upon which the mind can rest.  Thrones totter and fall; Commanders-in-chief are superseded; Admirals of the High Fleet are displaced; in politics leaders come and go and reputations pass; in ordinary life a thousand mutations are visible.  But amid all this flux there remains mercifully one resolute piece of routine that nothing can alter.  Whatever may be happening elsewhere in the world—­mutinies in the German Navy, revolutions in Russia, advances in France, advances in Flanders—­Leicester Square keeps its head.  Armageddon may be turning the world upside down, but it cannot cause those old antagonists, STEVENSON and REECE, to cease their perpetual contest; and if the War lasts another ten years you will read in The Times of October 17th, 1927, a paragraph to the effect that “at the close of play yesterday in the billiard match of 16,000 points up between Stevenson and Reece, at the Grand Hall, Leicester Square, the scores were:  Reece (in play), 4,676; Stevenson, 2,837.”

* * * * *

NOT CANNIBALS AFTER ALL.

    “The first contingent of the American troops brought food for six
    months, and hence the fears of the peasants in France lest they
    should be eaten up are groundless.”—­Adelaide Advertiser.

* * * * *

“If the public continue to spend the same sum of money on bread at 9d. as they did when it was 1s., it is easy to see that the consumption will rise by a quarter or 25 per cent.”—­Glasgow Evening News.

We are always timid about questioning a Scotsman’s arithmetic, but we make the increase a third, or 33-1/3 per cent.