“What mean ye, my son?” demanded Un’ Benny.  “Tell us—­you that don’t speak, as a rule, out of your turn.”

“I think,” answered Seth Minards slowly, “there is going to be War for certain—­a great War—­and in a few days.”

Three days later the postmistress, Mrs Pengelly (who kept a general shop), put out two newspaper placards which set all the children at the Council Schools, up the valley, playing at a game they called “English and Germans”—­an adaptation of the old “Prisoners’ Base.”  No one wanted to be a German:  but, seeing that you cannot well conduct warfare without an enemy, the weaker boys represented the Teutonic cause under conscription, and afterwards joined in the cheers when it was vanquished.

The Schools broke up on the last day of July; and the contest next day became a naval one, among the row-boats lying inside the old pier.  This was ten times better fun; for a good half of the boys meant to enter the Navy when they grew up.  They knew what it meant, too.  The great battleships from Plymouth ran their speed-trials off Polpier:  the westward mile-mark stood on the Peak, right over the little haven; and the smallest child has learnt to tell a Dreadnought in the offing, or discern the difference between a first-class and a second-class cruiser.  The older boys knew most of the ships by name.

Throughout Saturday the children were—­as their mother agreed—­“fair out of hand.”  But this may have been because the mothers themselves were gossiping whilst their men slumbered.  All Polpier women—­even the laziest—­knit while they talk:  and from nine o’clock onwards the alley-ways that pass for streets were filled with women knitting hard and talking at the top of their voices.  The men and the cats dozed.

Down by the boats, up to noon the boys had things all their own way, vying in feats of valour.  But soon after the dinner-hour the girls asserted themselves by starting an Ambulance Corps, and with details so realistic that not a few of the male combatants hauled out of battle on pretence of wounds and in search of better fun.

Nicholas Nanjivell, “mooning” by the bridge twelve paces from his door, sharpening his jack-knife upon a soft parapet-stone that was reported to bring cutlery to an incomparable edge and had paid for its reputation, being half worn away—­Nicholas Nanjivell, leaning his weight on the parapet, to ease the pain in his leg—­Nicholas Nanjivell, gloomily contemplating his knife and wishing he could plunge it into the heart of a man who stood behind a counter behind a door which stood in view beyond the bridge-end—­Nicholas Nanjivell, nursing his own injury to the exclusion of any that might threaten Europe—­glanced up and beheld his neighbour Penhaligon’s children, Young ’Bert and ’Beida (Zobeida), approach by the street from the Quay bearing between them a stretcher, composed of two broken paddles and part of an old fishing-net, and on the stretcher, covered by a tattered pilot-jack, a small form—­their brother ’Biades (Alcibiades), aged four.  It gave him a scare.