r.

They had no experience of slaughter and rapine, their imaginations were
not sufficiently strong to enable them to understand what these things
meant; they were lost in the pettiness of daily life and its pressing
local interests. Their homes in flames, they themselves massacred, their
women and children dragged off to be the slaves of the victors, a poor
remnant left to die of starvation among the wasted fields or to become
wild men of the rocks! All these things they looked upon as a mere tale,
a romance such as their local poets repeated in the evenings of a
wet season, dim and far-off events which might have happened to the
Canaanites and Jebusites and Amalekites in the ancient days whereof the
book of their Law told them, but which could never happen to _them_, the
comfortable Abati. In that book the Israelites always conquered in the
end, although the Philistines, alias Fung, sat at their gates. For it
will be remembered that it includes no account of the final fall of
Jerusalem and awful destruction of its citizens, of which they had
little if any knowledge.

So it came about that our recruiting parties, perhaps press gangs would
be a better term, were not well received. I know it, for this branch of
the business was handed over to me, of course as adviser to the Abati
captains, and on several occasions, when riding round the villages on
the shores of their beautiful lake, we were met by showers of stones,
and were even the object of active attacks which had to be put down with
bloodshed. Still, an army of five or six thousand men was got together
somehow, and formed into camps, whence desertions were incessant, once
or twice accompanied by the murder of officers.

"It's 'opeless, downright 'opeless, Doctor," said Quick to me, dropping
his h's, as he sometimes did in the excitement of the moment. "What can
one do with a crowd of pigs, everyone of them bent on bolting to his own
sty, or anywhere except toward the enemy? The sooner the Fung get them
the better for all concerned, say I, and if it wasn't for our Lady
yonder" (Quick always called Maqueda after "our Lady," after it had been
impressed upon him that "her Majesty" was an incorrect title), "my advice
to the Captain and you gentlemen would be: Get out of this infernal hole
as quick as your legs can carry you, and let's do a bit of hunting on
the way home, leaving the Abati to settle their own affairs."

"You forget, Sergeant, that I have a reason for