me by surprise. It just cleared the
parados. In fact, it kicked a lot of gravel into the back of my neck."

"Most people get it in the neck here, sooner or later," remarked
Captain Blaikie sententiously. "Personally, I don't much mind being
killed, but I do bar being buried alive. That is why I dislike Minnie
so." He rose, and stretched himself. "Heigho! I suppose it's about
time we detailed patrols and working parties for to-night. What a
lovely sky! A truly peaceful atmosphere--what? It gives one a sort of
Sunday-evening feeling, somehow."

"May I suggest an explanation?" said Wagstaffe.

"By all means."

"It _is_ Sunday evening!"

Captain Blaikie whistled gently, and said--

"By Jove, so it is." Then, after a pause: "This time last Sunday--"

Last Sunday had been an off-day--a day of cloudless summer beauty.
Tired men had slept; tidy men had washed their clothes; restless men
had wandered at ease about the countryside, careless of the guns which
grumbled everlastingly a few miles away. There had been impromptu
Church Parades for each denomination, in the corner of a wood which
was part of the demesne of a shell-torn chateau.

It is a sadly transformed wood. The open space before the chateau,
once a smooth expanse of tennis-lawn, is now a dusty picketing-ground
for transport mules, destitute of a single blade of grass. The
ornamental lake is full of broken bottles and empty jam-tins. The
pagoda-like summer-house, so inevitable to French chateau gardens, is
a quartermaster's store. Half the trees have been cut down for fuel.
Still, the July sun streams very pleasantly through the remainder, and
the Psalms of David float up from beneath their shade quite as sweetly
as they usually do from the neighbourhood of the precentor's desk in
the kirk at home--perhaps sweeter.

The wood itself is a _point d'appui_, or fortified post. One has to
take precautions, even two or three miles behind the main firing line.
A series of trenches zigzags in and out among the trees, and barbed
wire is interlaced with the undergrowth. In the farthermost corner
lies an improvised cemetery. Some of the inscriptions on the little
wooden crosses are only three days old. Merely to read a few of these
touches the imagination and stirs the blood. Here you may see the
names of English Tommies and Highland Jocks, side by side with their
Canadian kith and kin. A little apart lie more graves, surmounted by
epitaphs written in strange characte