rom the subject.

In that little room of hers, Miss N. had tea parties every day before
the afternoon lecture. I was often there. Sometimes I brought M. with
me. Always there were boys, as many as the room would hold, often
more than it held comfortably. _Pain d'epice_ is not my favourite
food in ordinary life, but I ate it with delight in that company. No
one, on this side of the grave, will ever know how much Miss N. did
for those boys in a hundred ways. I feebly guess, because I know what
her friendship meant to me. I was, I know, a trial to her. My lax
churchmanship must have shocked her. My want of energy must have
annoyed her. But she remained the most loyal of fellow-workers.

There were breakfast-parties, as well as tea-parties, in Miss N.'s
room on Sunday mornings. We had a celebration of the Holy Communion
at 6 o'clock and afterwards we breakfasted with Miss N. The memory
of one Sunday in particular remains with me. On Easter Sunday in 1915
I celebrated on board the _Lusitania_, a little way outside the
harbour of New York, the congregation kneeling among the arm-chairs
and card-tables of the great smoke-room on the upper deck. In 1916 I
read the same office in the class-room of the Y.S.C., with a rough
wooden table for an altar, a cross made by the camp carpenter and two
candles for furniture, and boys, confirmed ten days before, they and
Miss N., for congregation. Afterwards, in her little room, we had the
happiest of all our parties. Surely our Easter eggs were good to eat.

I have written of the members of the Y.S.C. as boys. They were boys,
but every now and then one or another turned out to be very much a
man in experience. There was one whom I came to know particularly
well. He had been "up the line" and fought. He had been sent down
because at the age of eighteen he could not stand the strain.

I was present in our little military church when he was baptized, and
on the same afternoon confirmed by Bishop Bury. I gave him his
confirmation card and advised him to send it home to his mother for
safety. "I think, sir," he said, "that I would rather send it to my
wife." He was a fellow-citizen of mine, born and bred in Belfast. We
Ulstermen are a forward and progressive people.

CHAPTER X

THE DAILY ROUND

In the camp in which I was first stationed there was a story current
which must, I think, have had a real foundation in fact. It was told
in most messes, and each mess claimed the hero of