the professional part of my visit, but we
fell to talking of fishing, which had been good, and cubbing, which
had been bad, and were on to Leg-o'-Mutton Common before I remembered
to speak of munitions.

"Not much sign of war here," I said with a relieved sigh. "I was
afraid they'd have spoilt the dear old heath for a certainty. Only
don't say it's Down Wood they've gone to, for that'd be more than I
could stand. I thought there were fairies there long after I ought
to have been a hard-headed young man of six, and if they've gone and
desecrated that wood with factories--"

The Squire smiled.

"I don't think I should worry. Amongst all your Unexpected Explosives
do you happen to condescend to have heard of the gentle horse-chestnut
and the school-children that collect them? Here are the two
delinquents I wrote to you about, and we've caught them in the act.
Just look at them wasting the precious things."

Two small boys were playing at conkers, two small boys with very
earnest faces and grubby clothes which never figured in KATE
GREENAWAY'S pictures, wasting precious material which five-and-thirty
other scholars were diligently collecting and stuffing into sacks. I
ought to have given them a lecture on patriotism--the army behind the
Army. But we each of us keep one childish passion untamed, even if we
are unromantic old bachelors, and I, His Majesty's Deputy Assistant
Acting Inspector for All Sorts of Unexpected Explosives and his very
loyal subject, who have lived for nearly half-a-century of Octobers in
London town--I borrowed the bigger conker and systematically and in
deadly earnest I fought and defeated the other small boy.

They say that treason never succeeds; so perhaps I can't be a traitor
after all.

* * * * *

THE UNDISMAYED.

In a world of insecurity and change it is good to have one bedrock
certainty upon which the mind can rest. Thrones totter and fall;
Commanders-in-chief are superseded; Admirals of the High Fleet are
displaced; in politics leaders come and go and reputations pass; in
ordinary life a thousand mutations are visible. But amid all this flux
there remains mercifully one resolute piece of routine that nothing
can alter. Whatever may be happening elsewhere in the world--mutinies
in the German Navy, revolutions in Russia, advances in France,
advances in Flanders--Leicester Square keeps its head. Armageddon
may be turning the world upside down, but it ca