“Eh, Jock,” I asked the laddie who gave it to me.  “A thing like yon’s hard to be getting, I’m thinking?”

“Oh, not so very hard,” he answered, carelessly.  “You’ve got to be a good shot.”  And he wore medals that showed he was!  “All you’ve got to do, Harry, is to kill the chap inside it before he kills you!  The fellow who used to own that outfit you’ve got hid himself in the fork of a tree, and, as you may guess, he looked like a branch of the tree itself.  He was pretty hard to spot.  But I got suspicious of him, from the way bullets were coming over steadily, and I decided that that tree hid a sniper.

“After that it was just a question of being patient.  It was no so long before I was sure, and then I waited—­until I saw that branch move as no branch of a tree ever did move.  I fired then—­and got him!  He was away outside of his lines, and that nicht I slipped out and brought back this outfit.  I wanted to see how it was made.”

An old, grizzled sergeant of the Black Watch gave me a German revolver.

“How came you to get this?” I asked him.

“It was an acceedent, Harry,” he said.  “We were raiding a trench, do you ken, and I was in a sap when a German officer came along, and we bumped into one another.  He looked at me, and I at him.  I think he was goin’ to say something, but I dinna ken what it was he had on his mind.  That was his revolver you’ve got in your hand now.”

And then he thrust his hand into his pocket.

“Here’s the watch he used to carry, too,” he said.  It was a thick, fat-bellied affair, of solid gold.  “It’s a bit too big, but it’s a rare good timekeeper.”

Soon after that an officer gave me another trophy that is, perhaps, even more interesting than the sniper’s suit.  It is rarer, at least.  It is a small, sweet-toned bell that used to hang in a wee church in the small village of Athies, on the Scarpe, about a mile and a half from Arras.  The Germans wiped out church and village, but in some odd way they found the bell and saved it.  They hung it in their trenches, and it was used to sound a gas alarm.  On both sides a signal is given when the sentry sees that there is to be a gas attack, in order that the men may have time to don the clumsy gas masks that are the only protection against the deadly fumes.  The wee bell is eight inches high, maybe, and I have never heard a lovelier tone.

“That bell has rung men to worship, and it has rung them to death,” said the officer who gave it to me.

Presently I was called back to my party, after I had spent some time with the lads in their huts.  A general had joined the party now, and he told me, with a smile, that I was to go up to the trenches, if I cared to do so.  I will not say I was not a bit nervous, but I was glad to go, for a’ that!  It was the thing that had brought me to France, after a’.

So we started, and by now I was glad to wear my steel hat, fit or no fit.  I was to give an entertainment in the trenches, and so we set out.  Pretty soon I was climbing a steep railroad embankment, and when we slid down on the other side we found the trenches—­wide, deep gaps in the earth, and all alive with men.  We got into the trenches themselves by means of ladders, and the soldiers came swarming about me with yells of “Hello, Harry!  Welcome, Harry!”