sent for him afterwards and inquired
after my friends at Polreen, his first words were, 'There now--I wasn'
so far wrong, after all! I knawed you must be mixed up with these
things, wan way or 'nother.'"

CONCERNING ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM.

Let those who know my affection for Troy consider what my feelings were,
the other day, when on my return from a brief jaunt to London I alighted
at the railway station amid all the tokens of a severe and general
catastrophe. The porter who opened the door for me had a bandaged head.
George the 'bus driver carried his right arm in a sling, but professed
himself able to guide his vehicle through our tortuous streets
left-handed. I had declined the offer, and was putting some
sympathetic question, when a procession came by. Four children of
serious demeanour conveyed a groaning comrade on a stretcher, while a
couple more limped after in approved splints. I stopped them, of
course. The rearmost sufferer--who wore on his shin-bone a wicker
trellis of the sort used for covering flower-plots, and a tourniquet,
contrived with a pebble and a handkerchief, about his femoral artery--
informed me that it was a case of First Aid to the Injured, which he was
rendering at some risk to his own (compound) fracture.

"It's wonderful," said George, with a grin, "what crazes the youngsters
will pick up."

Thereupon the truth came out. It appeared that during my absence a
member of the Ambulance Association of St. John of Jerusalem had
descended upon the town with a course of lectures, and the town had
taken up the novelty with its usual spirit.

I said a course of lectures; but in Troy we are nothing if not
thoroughgoing, and by this time (so George informed me) three courses
were in full swing. The railway servants and jetty-men (our
instructor's earliest pupils) had arrived at restoring animation to the
apparently drowned; while a mixed class, drawn from the townsfolk
generally, were learning to bandage, and the members of our Young
Women's Christian Association had attended but two lectures and still
dallied with the wonders of the human frame.

George told me all about it on our way through the town--for I had
consented to be driven on condition that he removed his arm from the
sling, and he could not deny this to an old friend (as I make free to
call myself). Besides, he was bursting to talk. To be sure, he slipped
it back for a few moments as we breasted the hill beyond the