hut, and report back here in an hour."

Tish did not like this; nor did I. As Tish observed later, he might
have been speaking to the butler.

"He might at least have said 'Mister,' and a 'please' hurts no one," she
said. As for giving him only an hour when we had come a hundred
miles--it was absurd. But war does queer things.

It had indeed strangely altered Tish's nephew. We were all worried about
him that day. It was his manner that was odd. He seemed, as Tish said
later, suppressed. When for instance we wished to take him back to
headquarters and present him to the colonel he said at once: "Who? Me?
The colonel! Say, you'd better get this and get it right: I'm nothing
here. I'm less than nothing. Why, the colonel could walk right over me
on the parade ground and never even know he'd stepped on anything. If I
was a louse and he was a can of insect powder----"

"Now see here, Charlie Sands," Tish said firmly, "I'll trouble you to
remember that there are certain words not in my vocabulary; and louse is
one of them."

"Still, a vocabulary is a better place than some others I can think of,"
he observed.

"What is more," Tish added, "you are misjudging that charming colonel.
He told us himself that he tried to be a mother to you all."

She then told him how interested the colonel had been in the blankets,
and so on, but I must say Charlie Sands was very queer about it. He
stopped and looked at us all in turn, and then he got out the dirtiest
handkerchief I have ever seen and wiped his forehead with it.

"Perhaps you'd better say it again," he said; "I don't seem to get it
altogether. You are sure it was the colonel?"

So Tish repeated it, but when she came to the eiderdown pillow he held
up his hand.

"All right," he said in a strange tone. "I believe you. I--you don't
mind if I go and get a drink of water, do you? My mouth is dry."

Dear Tish watched him as he went away, and shook her head.

"He is changed already," she observed sadly. "That is one of the
deadliest effects of war. It takes the bright young spirit of youth and
feeds it on stuff cooked by men, with not even time enough to chew
properly, and puts it on its stomach in the mud, while its head is in
the clouds of idealism. I think that a letter to the Secretary of War
might be effective."

I must admit that we had a series of disappointments that day. The first
was in finding that they had put Tish's nephew, a grandson of a former
Justice of th