hey abducted the lady, who was treated with great honour as a
visitor in her future father-in-law's house.

"Father" turned up next morning. Rakia was served, and father divulged
ceremoniously how many pigs he could spare to them for keeping his
daughter.

Number 13 wanted to know everything: how old was Jo, how much she was
paid?

"What, you are not paid?" he said in amazement. "Then the English are
wonderful! In Serbia our women would not do that."

Poor little John Willie still left a blank, though he had died long
before. His name was not John Willie, but it sounded rather like it, so
we just turned it into John Willie. He loved the name, and told his
father about it.

They sat all afternoon hand-in-hand, saying at intervals, "Dgonn Oolie,"
and chuckling.

Jan once had brought back from a spring visit to Kragujevatz some
horrible sun hats.

They were the cast-off eccentricities of the fashions of six years ago,
and had drifted from the Rue de la Paix to this obscure Serbian shop
which was selling them as serious articles of clothing. Jo tried them
on, and one of the nurses became so weak with laughter that she tumbled
all the way downstairs.

Finding them quite impossible, Jo bequeathed them to the ward, where
they were snapped up enthusiastically.

The ugliest was an immense sailor hat, the crown nearly as wide as the
brim, but the head hole would have fitted a doll. However, John Willie
fancied that hat and was always to be seen, a tiny, round-backed figure,
wandering slowly in a long blue dressing-gown, blue woolly boots, and
the enormous hat perched on the top of his pathetically drooping head.

One day poor little John Willie became fearfully ill. His parents
arrived and sat dumbly gazing at him for two nights, while he panted his
poor little life away. His friend the Velika Dete (big child), once a
fierce comitaj, was moved away from the "Malo Dete," to make more room,
and he sulked, while the Austrian prisoner orderlies ran to and fro with
water for his head, milk, all the things that a poor little dying boy
might need; and old Number 13 passed to and fro shaking his head, for he
had been long in hospital and had seen many people die.

A man with knees bent (he said with scroogling them up all winter in the
cold) was put in John Willie's place. The Velika Dete came back, but he
would not speak to "Bent Knees" for weeks.

By this time the Austrian prisoners were very well trained and made
excel