hat moment I was a coward."

The truth is that, except for the aforesaid stars who dwell apart, we all
have the potential saint and the potential sinner, the hero and the coward,
the honest man and the dishonest man within us.

There is a fine poem in _A Shropshire Lad_ that puts the case of the black
sheep as pregnantly as it can be put:--

There sleeps in Shrewsbury gaol to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad if things went right
Than most that sleep outside.

If things went right.... Do not, I pray you, think that in saying this I am
holding the candle to that deadly doctrine of determinism, or that, like
the tragic novelist, I see man only as a pitiful animal caught in the trap
of blind circumstance. If I believed that I should say "Better dead." But
what I do say is that we are so variously composed that circumstance does
play a powerful part in giving rein to this or that element in us and
making the scale go down for good or bad, and that often the best of us
only miss the wrong turning by a hair's breadth. Dirt, it is said, is only
matter in the wrong place. Put it in the right place, and it ceases to be
dirt. Give that man with twenty-seven convictions against him a chance of
revealing the better metal that is in him, and, lo! he is hailed as a hero
and decorated with the V.C.

THE VILLAGE AND THE WAR

"Well, have you heard the news?"

It was the landlord of the Blue Boar who spoke. He stopped me in the
village street--if you can call a straggling lane with a score of thatched
cottages and half a dozen barns a street--evidently bursting with great
tidings. He is an old soldier himself, and his views on the war are held in
great esteem. I hadn't heard the news, but, whatever it was, I could see
from the landlord's immense smile that there was nothing to fear.

"Jim has got a commission," said the landlord, and he said it in a tone
that left no doubt that now things would begin to move. For Jim is his son,
a sergeant-major in the artillery, who has been out at the front ever since
Mons.

The news has created quite a sensation. But we are getting so used to
sensations now that we are becoming _blase_. There has never been such a
year of wonders in the memory of any one living. The other day thousands of
soldiers from the great camp ten miles away descended on our "terrain"--I
think that's the word--and had a tremendous two-days' battle in the hills
about us. They bro