mechanism to work, for suddenly the Babe heard a voice bawling orders in German.  It was fully five seconds, he swears, before he recognised it as his own.  “Attention!” snarled the voice in proper Potsdammer style.  “Quick march!  Right wheel!” The three great hooligans trembled all over, clicked their heels and stepped off the mark as punctiliously as though on the Tempelhofer Feld at the Spring Parade.

In two minutes the Babe, snarling like a Zoo tiger at dinner-time, had manoeuvred them across a hundred yards of bog and filed them, goose-stepping, into a Nissen Hut full of sleeping Atkinses.  The Atkinses rolled, gaping, off their beds at the Babe’s first shout, and the game was up.

Ten minutes later the Bosch gentlemen were en route for the main guard under strong, if deshabille, escort.

It turned out that one of them spoke English quite badly and on reaching the Guard Room he opened out.

They had escaped from a prison camp at Abbeville, he said, and were heading for Holland, travelling by night.

Passing the farm at about midnight they espied our hooded mess-cart and, feeling tired and footsore, had conceived the bright idea of stealing a horse to fit the cart and driving to Holland in style and comfort.  Just as they were getting things shipshape along came the Babe and clapped the lid on—­“verfluchte kleine Teufel!”

When the Main Guard lads inquired how it was that after all their trouble they had allowed one lone unarmed infant to corral the three of them, instead of quietly biffing him on the head, as they quite easily might have done, the Huns were very confused.  At one moment they were in the shed, they said, fascinated like moths in the glare of the torch, and the next thing they knew they were in the midst of a horde of underclothed Tommies—­trapped.  As to what had happened in the interval, or how they had been spirited from one place to the other, they were not in the least clear—­couldn’t explain it at all.

The Drill Habit again.

PATLANDER.

* * * * *

ARMISTICE-TIME ECONOMY.

“The Consecrating Officers were elected Honorary Members of the Lodge and were presented with a souvenir in the form of a solid silver cigar ash-tray, made from the lead used in the production of shrapnel bullets.”

    Freemason’s Chronicle.

* * * * *

    “Several persons dropped to the pavement, several dripping with
    blood.  One man had his head partially opened, and he lay writing
    on the ground.”—­Provincial Paper.

If the poor fellow was, as we presume, a reporter, we cannot too much applaud his devotion to duty.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  NEWS FROM THE SHIRES.

Customer.  “WELL, JARVIS, WHAT’S THE LATEST?”