This must be the happy mean of which we hear so much.

* * * * *

THE RECENT TRUCE.

Students of geography know that Ballybun is divided from the back gardens of Kilterash by the pellucid waters of that noble stream, the Bun, which hurls itself over a barrier of old tin-cans in a frantic effort to find the sea.  But they do not know that this physical division, long ago bridged, is nothing to the moral and political division which will keep the two for ever asunder.

Several of our younger citizens have written to me from the trenches to ask how the War is progressing.  I have usually in reply quoted the remark of one of their number on leaving us for the Front after a short holiday, that he was now looking forward to a little peace and rest.  I wish here to add a postscript to this concerning a recent unexpected truce.

Political geography is not written as it should be, so that there may be people who have not even heard of the Great War between Ballybun and Kilterash.  No one knows for certain when it started, or why.  A local antiquary, after prolonged study of chronicles, memorials, rolls and records, to say nothing of local churchyards, refers it with some confidence to the reign of HENRY II. (LOUIS VII. being King of France, in the pontificate of ADRIAN IV. and so on), and to the forcible abduction of a pig (called the White Pearl) by the then ruling monarch of Kilterash.  The Editor of The Kilterash Curfew, in one of his recent “Readings for the Day of Rest,” remarked that Christian charity compelled him to hurl this foul aspersion back in the teeth of this so-called antiquary; the whole world knew that the pig had been born in the parish of Kilterash, but had “strayed” across the Bun, as things too often had the habit of straying.

I am the “so-called antiquary.”  My little pamphlet proves in less than three hundred pages the truth of my allegation concerning the abduction of the White Pearl, giving the original texts on which I rely and the genealogies of all concerned in a sordid story.

Since 1157, as far as history records, we have been afflicted with only two periods of truce.  One was when, on hearing of the foul wrong done by the German Brute in Belgium, we united in enlisting recruits for our local regiment.  This truce was broken by my worthy friend, the Editor of The Curfew, who pointed out, more in anger than in sorrow, that Ballybun had sent six men fewer than Kilterash.  The second truce—­again broken by the enemy—­concerned myself.  Wishing to add, if possible, to the evidence from monuments contained in my pamphlet, I was copying an inscription I had only just discovered in the disused churchyard of Killyburnbrae, when one of these light Atlantic showers sprang up and soaked me to the backbone.  The result was influenza and a high temperature, which rose while I was reading The Curfew upon my brochure, “The White Pearl of Ballybun, an Impartial Examination with the Original Documents herein set out and now for the first time deciphered by a Member of the Society of Antiquarians.  Dedicated to All Lovers of the Truth.  Printed by the Ballybun Binnacle Press.”