e old
lady what was in the vicarage garden.

"Well, this 'ere Purple Death,--it jes' wiped people out, Teddy. You
couldn't bury 'em. And it took the dogs and the cats too, and the rats
and 'orses. At last every house and garden was full of dead bodies.
London way, you couldn't go for the smell of there, and we 'ad to move
out of the 'I street into that villa we got. And all the water run short
that way. The drains and underground tunnels took it. Gor' knows where
the Purple Death come from; some say one thing and some another. Some
said it come from eatin' rats and some from eatin' nothin'. Some say the
Asiatics brought it from some 'I place, Thibet, I think, where it never
did nobody much 'arm. All I know is it come after the Famine. And the
Famine come after the Penic and the Penic come after the War."

Teddy thought. "What made the Purple Death?" he asked.

"'Aven't I tole you!"

"But why did they 'ave a Penic?"

"They 'ad it."

"But why did they start the War?"

"They couldn't stop theirselves. 'Aving them airships made 'em."

"And 'ow did the War end?"

"Lord knows if it's ended, boy," said old Tom. "Lord knows if it's
ended. There's been travellers through 'ere--there was a chap only two
summers ago--say it's goin' on still. They say there's bands of people
up north who keep on with it and people in Germany and China and 'Merica
and places. 'E said they still got flying-machines and gas and things.
But we 'aven't seen nothin' in the air now for seven years, and nobody
'asn't come nigh of us. Last we saw was a crumpled sort of airship going
away--over there. It was a littleish-sized thing and lopsided, as though
it 'ad something the matter with it."

He pointed, and came to a stop at a gap in the fence, the vestiges of
the old fence from which, in the company of his neighbour Mr. Stringer
the milkman, he had once watched the South of England Aero Club's
Saturday afternoon ascents. Dim memories, it may be, of that particular
afternoon returned to him.

"There, down there, where all that rus' looks so red and bright, that's
the gas-works."

"What's gas?" asked the little boy.

"Oh, a hairy sort of nothin' what you put in balloons to make 'em go up.
And you used to burn it till the 'lectricity come."

The little boy tried vainly to imagine gas on the basis of these
particulars. Then his thoughts reverted to a previous topic.

"But why didn't they end the War?"

"Obstinacy. Everybody was getting 'u