the school's old boys present, and continued--

"Just as I was leaving to join this battalion, the Head received
a letter from a boy's mother intimating that she was obliged to
withdraw her son, as he had received a commission in the army for the
duration of the war. She wanted to know if the Head would keep her
son's place open for him until he came back! What do you think of
that?"

"Sense of proportion wasn't invented when women were made," commented
Kemp. "But we are wandering from the subject, which is: what
advantages are we, personally, deriving from the war? Wagger, what are
you getting out of it?"

"Half-a-crown a day extra pay as Assistant Adjutant," replied
Wagstaffe laconically. "Ainslie, wake up and tell us what the war
has done for you, since you abandoned the Stock Exchange and took to
foot-slogging."

"Certainly," replied Ainslie. "A year ago I spent my days trying to
digest my food, tind my nights trying to sleep. I was not at all
successful in either enterprise. I can now sit down to a supper of
roast pork and bottled stout, go to bed directly afterwards, sleep all
night, and wake up in the morning without thinking unkind things
of anybody--not even my relations-in-law! Bless the Kaiser, say I!
Borrodaile, what about you? Any complaints?"

"Thank you," replied Borrodaile's dry voice; "there are no complaints.
In civil life I am what is known as a 'prospective candidate.' For
several years I have been exercising this, the only, method of
advertising permitted to a barrister, by nursing a constituency. That
is, I go down to the country once a week, and there reduce myself to
speechlessness soliciting the votes of the people who put my opponent
in twenty years ago, and will keep him in by a two thousand majority
as long as he cares to stand. I have been at it five years, but so far
the old gentleman has never so much as betrayed any knowledge of my
existence."

"That must be rather galling," said Wagstaffe.

"Ah! but listen! Of course party politics have now been merged in the
common cause--see local organs, _passim_--and both sides are working
shoulder to shoulder for the maintenance of our national existence."

"_Applause!_" murmured Kemp.

"That is to say," continued Borrodaile with calm relish, "my opponent,
whose strong suit for the last twenty years has been to cry down the
horrors of militarism, and the madness of national service, and the
unwieldy size of the British Empire, is now co