on cooler thoughts you will see in the light of a slip as might have happened to anybody.  Which in fact it did in this case.  P.S.—­Nanjivell ought to rhyme with civil.  What a mistake when it rhymes with D—!—­Yours faithfully’—­and I signed my name.  Then, on second thoughts, I tacked on another pos’script.  At this distance o’ time I can’t be sure if ’twas ’Flee from the Wrath to Come’ or ‘The Wages o’ Sin is Death’—­but I think the latter, as bein’ less easily twisted into a threat. . . .  That,” added the corporal after a pause, “closed the correspondence.”

“And where,” Nicky-Nan asked, “might all this have happened?”

“At Penryn:  which, for electoral purposes, is one borough with Falmouth. . . .  I hoped as you would ha’ laughed:  but I’m glad to find you interested, anyway.  Sandercock is my name, if you can make anything o’ that,—­Eli Sandercock, Fore Street, Penryn, pork and family butcher.  You’ve heard o’ Sandercock’s hogs-puddin’s I don’t doubt?”

“Never.”

“Haven’t travelled much, maybe?”

“Knocked about a little. . . .  Mostly on the China station an’ South Pacific.”

“Ah, they’re hot climates, by all accounts.  They wouldn’t—­no, o’ course they wouldn’t—­”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Bring you into contact, so to speak. . . .  You should see my vi’lets, too.”

“Violets?”

“They go together.  You may notice the same thing in Truro:  everybody that sells pork sells vi’lets.”

“Damme if I can see the connexion—­”

“You wouldn’t—­not at first.  Vi’lets is a delicate way of advertisin’ that there’s an r in the month, an’ your pork by consequence can be relied on.  My wife, too, is never happy without a great bowlful o’ vi’lets on the counter, done up in bunches:  she thinks they suit her complexion.  Now this patch o’ yours’d be the very place to raise vi’lets.  I was thinkin’ so just now when I measured it.  Suffer much from red-spider in these parts?”

“Not so far as I know. . . .  But ’tis a curious thing,” went on Nicky-Nan, “to find a man like you turned to sojerin’.”

“Ah,” cried Corporal Sandercock, eager for sympathy, “yes, well you may say that!  It seems like a dream. . . .  Of course in the pork-business August is always a slack month, an’ this blasted War couldn’ have happened at a more convenient season for pork, not if the Kaiser had consulted me.”

“But what drove ’ee to it?”

“Into the Engineers?  Well, ’tis hard to say. . . .  I always had leanin’s:  an’ then the sausages preyed on my mind—­they look so much like fuses.  So, what with one thing and another, and my wife likin’ to see me in scarlet, with piping down my legs, which is what we wear on Sundays—­’Tis a long story, however, an’ we can talk it over as we’re diggin’ up yer ’taties.”

“‘Diggin’ up my ’taties’?” Nicky-Nan echoed with a quaver.  “Let me catch you tryin’ it!”