n the air. It was
all immensely interesting and refreshing after the dark anxieties of
the shop. Edna wore a brown straw hat with poppies, that suited her
admirably, and sat in the trailer like a queen, and the eight-year-old
motor-bicycle ran like a thing of yesterday.

Little it seemed to matter to Mr. Bert Smallways that a newspaper
placard proclaimed:-- --------------------------------------- GERMANY
DENOUNCES THE MONROE DOCTRINE.

AMBIGUOUS ATTITUDE OF JAPAN.
WHAT WILL BRITAIN DO? IS IT WAR?---------------------------------------

This sort of thing was alvays going on, and on holidays one disregarded
it as a matter of course. Week-davs, in the slack time after the midday
meal, then perhaps one might worry about the Empire and international
politics; but not on a sunny Sunday, with a pretty girl trailing behind
one, and envious cyclists trying to race you. Nor did our young people
attach any great importance to the flitting suggestions of military
activity they glimpsed ever and again. Near Maidstone they came on
a string of eleven motor-guns of peculiar construction halted by the
roadside, with a number of businesslike engineers grouped about them
watching through field-glasses some sort of entrenchment that was going
on near the crest of the downs. It signified nothing to Bert.

"What's up?" said Edna.

"Oh!--manoeuvres," said Bert.

"Oh! I thought they did them at Easter," said Edna, and troubled no
more.

The last great British war, the Boer war, was over and forgotten, and
the public had lost the fashion of expert military criticism.

Our four young people picnicked cheerfully, and were happy in the manner
of a happiness that was an ancient mode in Nineveh. Eyes were bright,
Grubb was funny and almost witty, and Bert achieved epigrams; the
hedges were full of honeysuckle and dog-roses; in the woods the distant
toot-toot-toot of the traffic on the dust-hazy high road might have been
no more than the horns of elf-land. They laughed and gossiped and picked
flowers and made love and talked, and the girls smoked cigarettes. Also
they scuffled playfully. Among other things they talked aeronautics,
and how thev would come for a picnic together in Bert's flying-machine
before ten years were out. The world seemed full of amusing
possibilities that afternoon. They wondered what their
great-grandparents would have thought of aeronautics. In the evening,
about seven, the party turned homeward, expec