ear from him."

"It's not likely," replied Barry, "but the old gentleman is great stuff,
all right."

During the long, sunny spring day, their dinky little train whisked them
briskly through the sweet and restful beauty of the English southern
counties. To these men, however, from the wide sunbaked, windswept
plains of western Canada, the English landscape suggested a dainty
picture, done in soft greys and greens, with here and there a vivid
splash of colour, where the rich red soil broke through the green. But
its tiny fields set off with hedges, and lines of trees, its little,
clean-swept villages, with their picturesque church spires, its parks
with deer that actually stood still to look at you, its splendid manor
houses, and, at rare intervals, its turreted castles, gave these men,
fresh from the raw, unmeasured and unmade west, a sense of unreality. To
them it seemed a toy landscape for children to play with, but, as they
passed through the big towns and cities with their tall, clustering
chimneys, their crowding populations, with unmistakable evidences of
great wealth, their shipping, where the harbours bit into the red coast
line, there began to waken in them the thought that this tiny England,
so beautifully finished, and so neatly adorned, was something mightier
than they had ever known.

In these tiny fields, in these clean swept villages, in these manor
houses, in these castles, in factory and in shipyard, were struck deep
the roots of an England whose greatness they had never yet guessed.

The next afternoon brought them to the great military camp at
Shorncliffe, in a misty rain, hungry, for their rations had been
exhausted early in the day, weary from ship and train travel, and eager
to get their feet once again on mother earth.

At the little station they were kept waiting in a pouring rain for
something to happen, they knew not what. The R. T. O., a young Imperial
officer, blase with his ten months of war in England, had some occult
reason for delaying their departure. So, while the night grew every
moment wetter and darker, the men sat on their kit-bags or found such
shelter as they could in the tiny station, or in the lee of the "goods
trains" blocking the railroad tracks, growing more indignant and
more disgusted with the British high command, the war in general, and
registering with increasing intensity vows of vengeance against the
Kaiser, who, in the last analysis, they considered responsible f