ind, my dear fellow, a few years hence you and I will be
generals, and these people who annoy us now (meaning the red-tape
departmental clerks) will be looking out of their club windows, with
all their teeth falling out of their heads!"

During this same expedition, he spoke of the fact that their commanding
officer had missed the key-point, by saying:

"It's the same with everybody. We must stop floundering, or people
will forget that Khartoum is our objective and always will be."

Prophetic words for Kitchener of Khartoum.

Who was this strong, stern, silent soldier whose career linked up past
wars with the great World War of our own day?

Like Wellington and Roberts, Kitchener came of Irish stock. He was
born near Listowel, June 24, 1850, his father, Colonel Henry Kitchener,
having bought a considerable estate in the counties of Kerry and
Limerick.

Colonel Kitchener had seen a good deal of active service himself, and
still more of garrison life. He determined to retire, and after buying
some 2,000 acres of land in Ireland, at a bankrupt sale, he built a
hunting lodge, called Gunsborough House. This was Herbert Horatio
Kitchener's birthplace. Whether the name of the house had anything to
do with his warlike career, history does not state. But certain it is,
that he was a born soldier--a man of iron almost from his boyhood.

"Yes," said his old nurse, in talking about him only a few years ago,
"I know that he is a great man; and they tell me that he has no heart,
and that everybody is afraid of him; but they are wrong. He is really
one of the most tender-hearted men in the world; and whenever he comes
to see me, he is 'my boy' just as he was in the old days in Ireland,
when he used to run to me in all his troubles, and fling his arms
around me and hug me. Ah, there is nobody left who knows the real
Master Herbert as I know him."

As a boy at school, Herbert Kitchener was not very brilliant. Like
Wellington, whose mother called him "the fool of the family," Kitchener
did too much day-dreaming to make much headway with his studies. His
first teacher was a governess, who gave him up in despair. Then he was
sent to a private school where he did not do any better.

His father lost his patience. Just before an examination, he made a
dire threat.

"Young man," said the Colonel, "if you fail I'll make you toe the mark.
I'll send you to a girl's school."

Apparently the threat did not have the desired