nd any one who knew enough about Egypt to attempt a
verbal accompaniment of the slides.

At last we got a volunteer. He said frankly that he did not know half
the places we had pictures of, but offered to do his best. He did
exceedingly well with the places he did know, making the tombs of the
ancient Pharaohs quite interesting to the boys. But he was a
conscientious man. He refused to invent history to suit strange
pictures. When anything he did not recognise was thrown on the screen
he dismissed it rapidly. "This," he would say, "is another tomb,
probably of another king," or "This is a camel standing beside a
ruined archway." Every one was thoroughly satisfied.

We had another set of slides which gave us some trouble, a series of
pictures of racing yachts under sail. I had to take those on myself,
and I was rather nervous. I need not have been. The boys in that club
were capable of taking an interest in any subject under the sun.
Before I got to the last slide the audience was ready to shout the
name of every sail on a racing cutter, and could tell without
hesitation whether a yacht on a run was carrying her spinnaker on the
port or starboard hand. They say that all knowledge is useful. I hope
that it is.

Once or twice a lecturer failed us at the last moment without giving
us notice. Then J. and I had to run an entertainment of an
instructive kind extempore. J. was strong on personal hygiene. He
might start with saluting or the theft of Miss N.'s purse, our great
club scandal, but he worked round in the end to soap and tooth
brushes. My own business, if we were utterly driven against the wall,
was to tell stories.

The most remarkable and interesting lecture we ever had was given on
one of those emergency occasions by one of our members. He
volunteered an account of his experiences in the trenches. He cannot
have been much more than seventeen years old, and ought never to have
been in the trenches. He was undersized and, I should say, of poor
physique. If the proper use of the letter "h" in conversation is any
test of education, this boy must have been very little educated. His
vocabulary was limited, and many of the words he did use are not to
be found in dictionaries. But he stood on the platform and for half
an hour told us what he had seen, endured, and felt, with a
straightforward simplicity which was far more effective than any art.
He disappeared from our midst soon afterwards, and I have never seen
him