boy Bill.

Alice gave her back the card. She had held on to the woman's hand all
the time, and now she squeezed the hand, and held it against her face.
But she could not say a word because she was crying so. The soldier's
mother took the card again and she pushed Alice away, but it was not an
unkind push, and she went in and shut the door; and as Alice and Oswald
went down the road Oswald looked back, and one of the windows of the
cottage had a white blind. Afterwards the other windows had too. There
were no blinds really to the cottage. It was aprons and things she had
pinned up.

Alice cried most of the morning, and so did the other girls. We wanted
to do something for the soldier's mother, but you can do nothing when
people's sons are shot. It is the most dreadful thing to want to do
something for people who are unhappy, and not to know what to do.

It was Noel who thought of what we COIULD do at last.

He said, 'I suppose they don't put up tombstones to soldiers when they
die in war. But there--I mean Oswald said, 'Of course not.'

Noel said, 'I daresay you'll think it's silly, but I don't care. Don't
you think she'd like it, if we put one up to HIM? Not in the churchyard,
of course, because we shouldn't be let, but in our garden, just where it
joins on to the churchyard?'

And we all thought it was a first-rate idea.

This is what we meant to put on the tombstone:

'Here lies

BILL SIMPKINS

Who died fighting for Queen

and Country.'

'A faithful son,
A son so dear,
A soldier brave
Lies buried here.'

Then we remembered that poor brave Bill was really buried far away in
the Southern hemisphere, if at all. So we altered it to--

'A soldier brave
We weep for here.'

Then we looked out a nice flagstone in the stable-yard, and we got a
cold chisel out of the Dentist's toolbox, and began.

But stone-cutting is difficult and dangerous work.

Oswald went at it a bit, but he chipped his thumb, and it bled so he had
to chuck it. Then Dicky tried, and then Denny, but Dicky hammered his
finger, and Denny took all day over every stroke, so that by tea-time
we had only done the H, and about half the E--and the E was awfully
crooked. Oswald chipped his thumb over the H.

We looked at it the next morning, and even the most sanguinary of us saw
that it was a hopeless task.