nd the turn of the day on the "quiet waters
of the River Lee." Pale blue columns of smoke rose above the verdant
boskiness which masked the squat brown cabins where the peat fires
smouldered, and along the straggling stone wall which crowned the ridge
the swaying heads of home-returning cows showed intermittently against
the glowing western sky. The peacefulness of it was almost palpable. You
seemed to breathe it, and could all but reach out with the hand and
touch it.

It permeated even to the long lines of lean destroyers in the stream,
and it was the subtly suggestive influence of it which had deflected
homeward the minds of the motley-clad sailors who were lounging at ease
about the stern of the first of a "cluster" of three of these--like a
sheaf of bright multi-coloured arrows the trim craft looked, with the
level rays of the setting sun striking across them where they lay moored
alongside each other--and set tongues wagging of the little things
which, magnified by distance, loom large in the imaginations of men in
exile.

They were deep in the "old home town" stuff when I sauntered
inconsequently aft on the off-chance of picking up a yarn or two, but as
there appeared to be no one present from my part of the country, no
immediate opportunity to break in presented itself. Equally an outsider
was I when the flow of discussion turned to woollen sweaters and socks
and mufflers, and the golden trails of romance leading back from the
names and messages sewed or knitted into them.

No fair unknowns had ever sent _me_ any of these soft comforts, and
after I had heard a lusty youngster from Virginia tell how a "sweater
address" he had written what he described as a "lettah that was good and
plenty w'am, b'lieve me," replied that she was "jest goin' twelve
years," and that her mother didn't think she ought to be thinking of
marriage just yet--after that I didn't feel quite so bad over not having
had a chance to open one of these "woolly" correspondences. There was
some solace, too, in hearing a pink-cheeked young ex-bank clerk tell how
the "abdominal bandage" (they name them, as a rule, after the garment
that starts the correspondence), with whom he had exchanged something
like a dozen letters of cumulative passion, brought the affair to a
sudden and violent end by some indirect and inadvertent admission which
showed that she remembered when Grant was President.

But when the talk drifted, as it always does in the end,