“Here, Harry—­here’s your money!” they said.  “Now give us back our flag!”

Back to them I gave it—­and with it the money they had brought, to be added to the fund for the soldier boys.  And so that one flag brought three hundred pounds sterling to the soldiers.  I wonder did those folk at Christchurch think I would keep the money and make a profit on that flag?

Had it been another time I’d have stayed in New Zealand gladly a long time.  It was a friendly place, and it gave us many a new friend.  But home was calling me.  There was more than the homebound tour that had been planned and laid out for me.  I did not know how soon my boy might be going to France.  And his mother and I wanted to see him again before he went, and to be as near him as might be.

So I was glad as well as sorry to sail away from New Zealand’s friendly shores, to the strains of pipers softly skirling: 

“Will ye no come back again?”

We sailed for Sydney on the Minnehaha, a fast boat.  We were glad of her speed a day or so out, for there was smoke on the horizon that gave some anxious hours to our officers.  Some thought the German raider Emden was under that smoke.  And it would not have been surprising had a raider turned up in our path.  For just before we sailed it had been discovered that the man in charge of the principal wireless station in New Zealand was a German, and he had been interned.  Had he sent word to German warships of the plans and movements of British ships?  No one could prove it, so he was only interned.

Back we went to Sydney.  A great change had come since our departure.  The war ruled all deed and thought.  Australia was bound now to do her part.  No less faithfully and splendidly than New Zealand was she engaged upon the enterprise the Hun had thrust upon the world.  Everyone was eager for news, but it was woefully scarce.  Those were the black, early days, when the German rush upon Paris was being stayed, after the disasters of the first fortnight of the war, at the Marne.

Everywhere, though there was no lack of determination to see the war through to a finish, no matter how remote that might be, the feeling was that this war was too huge, too vast, to last long.  Exhaustion would end it.  War upon the modern scale could not last.  So they said —­in September, 1914!  So many of us believed—­and this is the spring of the fourth year of the war, and the end is not yet, is not in sight, I fear.

Sydney turned out, almost as magnificently as when I had first landed upon Australian soil, to bid me farewell.  And we embarked again upon that same old Sonoma that had brought us to Australia.  Again I saw Paga-Paga and the natural folk, who had no need to toil nor spin to live upon the fat of the land and be arrayed in the garments that were always up to the minute in style.

Again I saw Honolulu, and, this time, stayed longer, and gave a performance.  But, though we were there longer, it was not long enough to make me yield to that temptation to cuddle one of the brown lassies!  Aweel, I was not so young as I had been, and Mrs. Lauder—­ you ken that she was travelling with me?