ts are
littered with all the grim debris of War.

Nixey's has not come scathless through the ordeal. The stately brick
chimneys of the kitchen and coffee-room have been broken off like carrots,
and replaced by tin funnels. Patches of the universal medium, corrugated
iron, indicate where one of Meisje's ninety-four-pound projectiles
recently plumped in through the soft brick of the east wall end, and
departed by the west frontage, leaving two holes that might have
accommodated a chest of drawers, and carrying a window with it. Mrs.
Nixey, the children, and the women of the staff inhabit a bombproof in the
back-yard. The waiters have developed a grasshopper-like nimbleness,
otherwise things go on as usual.

It being Sunday, a large long man and another as long, but less bulky, are
extended in a couple of long bamboo chairs on Nixey's longish front
verandah. The blue, fragrant smoke of two long cigars curls upwards over
their supine heads, and two long drinks containing a very meagre modicum
of inferior whisky are contained in two long tumblers, resting in the
bamboo nests cunningly devised for their accommodation in the chair-arms.

It is hot, but both the men look cool and lazy, and almost too fresh to
have spent the greater part of the night, the younger upon advanced
patrol-duty, and the elder at the Staff bombproof in the Southern Lines,
where messages come in and where messages go out, and where reports are
received and from whence orders are despatched from sunset to the peep of
day, and from peep of day to sunset.

The wardrobes of both warriors are much impaired by active service, but
their originally white flannel trousers, if patched, discoloured, and
shrunken by amateur lavations, boast the cut of Bond Street; their shirts,
if a trifle ragged, are immaculately clean, and the cracks in their canvas
shoes are disguised by a lavish expenditure of pipeclay. Beauvayse has
rummaged out and mounted a snowy double collar in honour of the day, with
a knitted silk necktie of his Regimental colours, and a kamarband to match
is wound about his narrow, springy waist, and knotted to perfection. Both
men might be basking on an English river-bank after a stiff pull
up-stream, or resting after a bout at tennis on an English lawn, but for
the revolver-lanyards round their strong, bronzed throats, ending in the
butts of Smith and Wesson's revolvers of Service calibre, the bandoliers
and belts that lie handy on a table, and the