June 29, 1915.—The feast of Peter and Paul comes round with a new significance. In war time we learn the meaning of so much that has seemed unimportant; of things hidden away at the back of our consciousness—things neglected, unknown, or even despised—and we learn, too, the worthlessness of so much that has seemed paramount and necessary, desirable and precious. War is a stern master. He teaches above all the relative values; how to weigh the greater against the less; how to fling away with one superb gesture the whole sum of human possessions for a single imperishable prize.

“What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?”

He who spoke these words gently to a handful of poor Jews now seems to cry them with a voice of thunder from end to end of the earth.

Thus, this, their festival day, brings the two great champions of the Cross—and it is for Christ and the Cross that every son of England is fighting to-day—before our minds with a singular vividness and nearness: Peter, type of the natural man, untutored; sure of himself and of his own good impulses, of the honest purpose of his guileless heart; impetuous, loving, weak, with all purely human weakness, even to betrayal; and—divinely strengthened—Peter the rock, Peter the fisherman who conquered the world! Paul, the Patrician, the apostle born out of due time, whose ardour is all of the intellect, keen as a blade and burning as a flame; the little man of Tarsus upon whose spirit the teaching of all Christianity reposes as firmly to-day as does the Church upon the stone of Peter; Paul, whom the Captain, Christ Himself, enlisted by the miraculous condescension of a personal appeal. Has not every Christian, whatever his creed, vowed them reverence throughout all the ages? To-day, may not the eyes of the believer look up to them with a new confidence?

The Signora, lying through a wakeful night and thinking of these things, went with a rush of memory back to Rome, to scenes and experiences and thoughts dominated by the memories of the two chief apostles.

There is nothing more characteristic of their lives than the different manners of their death. Peter is Peter to the end; first yielding to the natural impulse, then, by virtue of the grace of God, returning upon himself and leaping to the highest altitude of superhuman sacrifice. In the whole tradition of the Church there is no legend more touching than that which tells us how Peter, flying out of Rome, met the Christ carrying the Cross. It is the original Peter in all his guilelessness who, unstartled by the vision, with the perfect simplicity of his faith, asks: “Domine quo vadis?” And it is the sublime founder of the Church of God who, unquestioning, accepts the Master’s rebuke, and retraces his steps to face his Lord’s torment with the added agony his own holy humility demands.

Every pilgrim to Rome has knelt or stood, prayed or pondered at the tomb of Peter in the golden twilight of the great Basilica, by the vastness of which, as Marion Crawford says, “mind and judgment are dazed and staggered.” Who has not leant on the marble balustrade of the confession and looked down upon the ninety-five gilded lamps that burn there day and night, upon the kneeling white figure of the Seventh Pius?—a vision in which the whole linked grandeur and piety of the Church of Rome seems epitomized. In St. Peter’s, Simon, the poor fisherman, is little thought of; it is Peter, saint and pontiff, who is paramount; he who has miraculously fed the lambs and fed the sheep from that hour on the sea of Galilee to this day. And very few remember the old man, too weak and aged to bear his cross, who had climbed half-way to the Janiculum, when his executioners, seeing that he could not advance any further, planted his gibbet in the deep yellow sand and crucified him then and there—head downwards, as he begged them. This is the ancient tradition, and it further tells us that he was followed by but few of the faithful, who stood apart, weeping.

Impressive as are these hallowed spots, these glorious memorials of the Eternal City; however full, to the believer, of the atmosphere of the days of faith—oases in the great desert of life, where the palms of the martyrs are still green and throw a grateful shade—there is nothing, to our minds, in all the grandeur of Rome, even under the dome of Peter, comparable to the effect produced upon the mind by a visit to Tre Fontane.

As Peter was led to die the death of the lowest criminal—the death of his Master—Paul was brought forth to the death of the sword, reserved for the Patrician.

To go to Tre Fontane and visit the spot of his martyrdom is to return to the primitive ages of the Church. The fisherman lies in a tomb such as no king or emperor, no hero or conqueror or best beloved of the world’s potentates ever had. And Paul sleeps in that great pillared church fuori le mura, in a severity and dignity of magnificence very well befitting the stern fire of the apostle’s zeal. But the memory of his martyrdom is consecrated in a curious isolation of poverty, one might almost say, aloofness; an earnest purity that reminds one, as we have said, of early Christian times. You have all the splendours; the golden glory, the marble, the mosaic, the sculpture and the jewels; the movement, the colour and the crowd of Rome behind, and you come out into the sweeping solitudes of the Campagna. For those who know and love those strange, arid, melancholy spaces, there is no more potent spell than the hold they lay upon the spirit. The gem-like distances of the mountains, the radiant arch of the Italian sky, the movement of light and shadow over the immense waste, the romance of each of the historic ways, the mystery of the secrets they hold—better pens than ours have striven to embody the charm and failed! Why should we try? It is like a strain of music the meaning of which is lost to us. We hear; we cannot understand. It is too full of messages. It is sad and beautiful and haunting, and withal intensely human. Here you have nature at her wildest and most untrammelled; and yet, never was city so peopled, so thick with memories of all races and all histories; endless streams of pilgrims have traversed the long roads; the centuries have come and gone upon them; the blood, the tears, the strivings and hopes of all humanity are here.

One looks forward towards wave upon wave of low-lying ground, bordered by the mountain barriers; and each time one looks back, the dome of Peter hangs pearl-like against the sky.

Speaking of the memory of our drive to Tre Fontane, the Signorina is reminded that she has jotted down her impressions in an old diary.

“We drove to the Trappist Monastery,” she wrote, “where St. Paul was beheaded. His head is said to have rebounded three times as it struck the earth, and on each of those three hallowed spots there sprang up a miraculous jet of water. The first spring is still warm as if with the glow of the great spirit that there left its mortal frame; the second spring is tepid; the third cold as death.

“The drive is a beautiful one; through the Campagna stretching wide and green on either side, bounded by the mountains, some now snow-capped. The first sight of the monastery breaks on one from the top of a little hill. The huddled buildings appear suddenly at the foot in a deep valley, shrouded by eucalyptus groves. On the right of the convent the ground rises again, covered with a perfect forest of the same trees. It is one of the saddest and most impressive places I ever saw. It strikes chill, even when the rest of the Campagna is warm, and the continual shuddering of the eucalyptus leaves makes an uncanny murmur. We drove through an avenue of them, grey-green all over, trunks and leaves; and then came to an arched gateway closed by an iron gate.

“We dismounted from our carriage, already quite impressed, and pulled the bell, which echoed with a deep and beautiful note through the monastery grounds.

“A porter opened and we walked into the garden, still under the eucalyptus (mingled here with palms and lemons), and made more beautiful still by the fragments of antique sculpture that border the walks—marble capitols and broken acanthus leaves and pieces of old pavements wonderfully worked in scrolls and twists.

“Papa particularly lost his heart to a lion’s head, with a dear flat nose! He could not tear himself away from it; he wanted it so badly for our new little garden in Surrey!

“As there are three fountains, so there are three churches, but the miraculous springs are all under one roof. This is a fine, comparatively modern church, situated at the end of an avenue of eucalyptus and marble fragments. It has a classic pavement (pagan) representing the four seasons.

“Opposite the entrance are the fountains—built in, now, and covered over, but each with a little opening where the attendant friar will let down a ladle and draw up the water for the faithful. Over each fountain is an altar, with the head of St. Paul, in bas-relief, sculptured by Canova:

“‘A la premiÈre, l’Âme vient À l’instant mÊme de s’Échapper du corps. Ce chef glorieux est plein de vie! A la seconde, les ombres de la mort couvrent dÉjÀ ses admirables traits; À la troisiÈme, le sommeil Éternel les a envahis, et quoique demeurÉs tout rayonnants de beautÉ, ils disent, sans parler, que dans ce monde ces lÈvres ne s’entr’ouvriront plus, et que ce regard d’aigle s’est voilÉ pour toujours.’

“In the right-hand corner of the first altar is the pillar which marks the actual spot of the martyrdom of the fiery-hearted saint. The ancient Via Lorentina passed along this very place, and here stood the mile-stone, whereat St. Paul was beheaded.

“‘This is absolutely certain,’ said the monk who conducted us. ‘Even protestants acknowledge the death to have taken place here. For the rest,’ indicating the three fountains, ‘there is only the legend. You may believe it or not, as you like.’

“He looked so happy, this monk. He had been thirty years at Tre Fontane, but there was no sign of age on his face. It was, perhaps, a trifle withered, like a ripe apple that has lain long on a shelf, but that was all. And yet he said that, for the first fifteen years, he had suffered continuously from malarial fever. He had superintended, and even worked at, the planting of the eucalyptus groves which have so purified the district that there has not been one case of the sickness since.

“The other two churches are close to one another. The first is very old and utterly bare, and, in a strange, mournful way, deeply impressive. It dates from the sixth century, and is lofty and vaulted and almost Gothic in its spirit. It has several rose-windows, and there are many round holes in the walls also. These are now either empty or fitted with common glass, but they were once filled with thin slices of alabaster, or other precious transparencies. At present it seems the embodiment in stone of the Trappist order, ‘la piu severa ordine della chiesa Cattolica,’ as our monk described it. The church is as cold as a well.

“The last of the three churches is of a much gayer mood: quite Romanesque, perched on a pretty flight of rounded steps. It has a crypt over the bodies of St. Zeno and two thousand and more companions, martyred Christians, who built the Baths of Diocletian.”

The drive through that eucalyptus wood here described remains one of the most curious impressions of those Roman days. It was like passing through a Dante circle—the first circle of all, of Limbo, where Virgil met the poet; an unsubstantial wraith-like world, full of a perpetual whisper and murmur:

Whether the sky became really overcast as we entered into these mysterious precincts, or whether the height of the trees shadowed the narrow way, certainly there was a dimness about us; not a positive darkness but a negation of light, even as the chill that enfolded us was not so much a cold as a cessation of heat.

But through the gates of the monastery courtyard we saw sunshine again, and white pigeons strutting about the cobbles, picking and preening themselves—a wonderful picture of peace. It is a consecrated spot; a place the most aloof, the most severe, the most denuded of all earthly joys that we have ever seen; a stage on the arid way of pilgrims forging determinedly by the shortest cut to heaven. And yet it is full of sweetness. As from a mountain ledge, the world must lie so far below these Trappists that it is no longer seen, scarcely divined behind its own vapours. No use looking down: looking up—there is the blue sky, and there are the peaks pointing heavenward, still to be conquered. There is very little comfort for the traveller, but he has a strange gladness. He is cradled in ethereal silences. The balm of majestic solitude bathes his soul; his spirit is cheered by an air as pure as it is vivifying, and he knows that he will climb the peaks.

July 4.—Mrs. McComfort, our cook, has a brother on the Clyde. He writes an extraordinary account of the effort expected of, and given by, the able workman.

“It may be, miss,” says Mrs. McComfort to the Signorina, her chief confidant, “he’ll be called up for a job on a ship that’s just come in, and that’ll mean that he and the rest of them will be at it from seven in the morning till eight the next morning. Yes, miss, all night, as well as all day. And then they’ll come home, and it’s too weary to eat they are, and they’ll just roll themselves up and fall asleep, as tired as dogs; and when they’ve slept a bit, maybe they can get a little food down. And then it’s off back again to work! And that’ll go on till the job’s done. And when the battleships come in, the steamers do be waiting all night upon the Clyde, to take the men up to them, it’s that urgent. And, oh, miss, how they do love the ships they’ve built! And when one is lost, you’d never believe the grief there is, with the men crying and saying: ‘It’s my old lady’s gone, my poor old lady!’”

They need no comment, such stories as these. Here are humble heroes, martyrs of duty; here is the poor heart of humanity, with its infinite power of attachment. We have scarcely heard of anything more touching than the tears of these rough men for their “poor old lady.”

We saw a letter the other day from a transport driver describing, to a relative in England, the meeting with an old friend on the bloodstained, shell-battered road at the back of Arras. This man had been the driver of a motor omnibus in a country district at home.

“What do you think?” he writes. “You’ll never believe! If I didn’t come across old Eliza! Me that drove her for more than three years. I knew her at once, poor old girl! knocked about as she was; I’d have known her anywhere, by the shape of her, knowing her in and out as I did those years, every bit of her. She was a bit the worse for wear, but she was fit for a lot yet; a trifle rattley; but there’s a deal of life in her. I can’t tell you what I felt when I came across her so sudden. There, I couldn’t help patting her and patting her! Poor old Eliza! To think of her and me meeting again like that, both of us doing our bit, like!”

This fourth day of July brings us the third of the rain and thunder squalls which have followed the great drought.

Japhet says, relaxing to something approaching a smile, that he doesn’t see why this should not end by being a nice garden, and that the earth is in very good heart.

Dear English earth, it has need to be in good heart! Who knows what it may yet have to bear and give?

The Villino garden wears the war-time stamp, at least to its owners’ eye! The Signora, who has always hitherto plunged at a horticultural list the moment there was a gap in her borders that needed filling or a mistake that needed repairing, which could not be done to her sense of perfection “out of stock,” has had to teach economy to wait on necessity, and ingenuity on both. The result is not really gratifying. In all her long experience economy has never been gratifying in any branch of life. But even if the money were there for extravagance—which it isn’t—thrift has become a positive instead of a negative virtue.

“Thou shalt not spend” is now nearly as urgent a commandment as “Thou shalt not steal.”

It has set her mind to work more and more, however, upon the desirability of permanence in the garden.

In the borders of the terraces round the house she has decided to put a foot-deep edging of Mrs. Simkins pinks. These are adorable in their time of bloom, and the grey-green foliage is tidy, and a pretty bit of colour all the year round.

This year the lobelia, scantily planted, and the climbing geraniums, pathetically subdivided, will take considerable time before forming the show of flower and foliage without which the Villino garden is a failure. But it is a very good thing for individuals as well as nations to be forced to stop and examine their manner of life. Hideous as the struggle is—dead loss of life and happiness and money—good comes out of the evil at many points. Not the least beneficial lesson is that which teaches us now what an extraordinary amount of money and energy one has frittered away by easy-going ways, the amount of items one can put down in a household without being the worse—rather, indeed, the better! Even in a little household, what waste, what excess, what follies of mere show! And if this seems a flat contradiction to the remark upon economy passed a little while ago, let it be noted that conscience and inclination are for ever waging war, and that conscience, as is proper, must have the last word. Moreover, once the domination of conscience is established, the results are, in nine cases out of ten, surprisingly bearable. Frugality combines very well with refinement, and simplicity with dignity. One can be as happy with a three-course lunch and a three-course supper-dinner as one was with an endless array of dishes—those dishes which took so much time and material to prepare, and were so often barely touched! The contents disappeared—thrown away, perhaps, or, what was certainly the case in our household, disposed of as hors d’oeuvres between the dining-room and the pantry.

“Why does your butler always come in chewing?” asked an observant relative.

Juvenal, indeed, despite a certain foreign disregard for his meal-times, made such a practice of snatching morsels in transit that the sixteen-year old footman—chief of the many grievances which determined our separation—who outstayed him, has had to be severely reprimanded for making a clean sweep of the dishes that caught his young fancy, with a special partiality for roast chicken.

The new regimen—agreeable this hot weather—of soup, one cold-meat dish, salad, vegetable, sweet, and dessert—supper, in fact, instead of dinner—has, besides its intrinsic economy, the further advantage of diminishing the expenditure of kitchen coal to an almost incredible degree.

We who have to render an account hereafter, even of every idle word, shall we have to answer, we wonder, for all that unconscious waste which mere convention has induced in our homes? How many poor families might have been fed from the agglomeration of the Signora’s years of housekeeping! She did not think. No one thought. It has taken this scourge to make us stop in our easy course, to make us look into ourselves, into our ways.

“What can we do? What can we do without?” These must be now the mottoes written large round our house of life; and, indeed, the first includes the second, for it takes considerable energy to abstain.

“There is none that thinketh in his heart, therefore they shall go down alive into hell.”

A very disagreeable text, which comes disagreeably to the mind this Sunday morning, for the famiglia have just come back from church, where what is vulgarly called a “hell-fire sermon” was delivered by a Welsh preacher, who, though a Franciscan, is, one of his congregation declared, a revivalist lost to his native hills.

“You ought to go down into hell in spirit every day, me brethren,” he thundered, “or ye’ll very likely find yourselves there in the end. And what an off-ful thing that ’ud be! And there’s thousands and thousands of soa-ouls there this minute, better than you are!”

This was neither comforting, nor, we believe, theological, for the congregation was small, and, on the whole, devout. But no doubt there is a type of mind before which it is necessary to hold up a threat of everlasting punishment; the type of person whom conscription alone can move to serve his country before it is too late.

Not the least remarkable result of the German brutality is that the great majority of its opponents find themselves forced back into the old simplicity of belief. We can no longer afford to deny the existence of demons and their power; and if reason is to keep her balance and the soul her ultimate faith in Divine justice, acceptance of the doctrine of hell and adequate punishment must logically follow.

A celebrated, if rather medievally minded, preacher, whom we once heard lashing the vices of the day, cried sarcastically: “You’ll meet the very best society in hell.”

Holy man, we doubt if he would have made the same remark to-day! The resort in question must have become so overwhelmingly German.

July 8.—The Signora had been a whole year at the Villino—perhaps the longest time in all her life in one place—but circumstances had summoned her family to London for a few days, and she could not contemplate their being exposed to Zeppelins without her.

The little London house which was our home so long, and—to use nursery parlance—the nose of which has been so completely put out of joint by the Villino, seemed glad to see us again.

How curious is the atmosphere of place! These walls that enfold us, that have seen our swift joys and our great sorrows, our merry hours and our sad ones, become fond of us, as we of them. We are convinced that there is a spirit in inanimate things, something that gives back, that keeps. Do not old places ponder? Are they not set with memories? Do they not know their own? Do they not withhold themselves and suffer from the stranger? Who has not seen the millionaire striving to make himself at home in the great house that will have none of him? Who has not felt what an accident he is, how little he belongs, how little he or his race will ever belong to the stones he has bought, and which he will never own?

And even a little London house in a street may become individual to oneself; and you may feel as the Signora did, that it has missed you, that through long absence you have been unkind; that if you finally separate yourself from it, it will always want you, and you it. And, after all—it is with houses, as with people—the link is not necessarily that of the blood relationship or long acquaintance. You need not have inherited your affinity. You are in sympathy, or you are not. The Villino claimed us upon our first meeting, but we impressed ourselves upon the town dwelling. It is still home to us; not the home, a home.

We sat in the high-ceilinged drawing-room, with its rather delicate Georgian air, and found old familiar emotions waiting for us. And we thought of all the kind and dear friends we had seen between these walls; of our gay little parties and the music-makers who had made music to us; hours that seemed to belong to another life. Here the great Pole, whose magic hands have refused themselves to the notes ever since his people have been in anguish, made the night wonderful with his incomparable art. We do not think the small London house can ever forget the echoes of that music. It was always a feast for it when he, with whose friendship we feel ourselves so deeply honoured, came to its board. Loki—he was in his puppyhood then—decorated with the Polish colours, would dance towards him on his hind-legs. The genius would come in like sunshine, happy himself in the immense pleasure his presence gave. Certainly this rare being seemed to give forth light.

“When he leaves the room,” said a friend of his to us, “it is as if the light went out.”

If one had the gift of beholding auras, what a halo of fire would one not have seen about that wonderful head? We once said this to him.

“Do you believe in it?” we asked.

He smiled. “I think everyone has got his flame to cultivate. I think I have cultivated mine.”

Most truly, indeed, has he done so; and not only in the divine way of his art, for year by year the selflessness and the magnanimity of his character seem to deepen and extend; and so, too—inevitable tragedy of years—the sadness. Impossible for any perfectly noble mind not to gather melancholy as life goes on!—a melancholy culminating in his case with the burthen of agony which the present sufferings of his own race have laid upon his shoulders.

Therefore these memories of the days when he was as a young god, the days when a celebrated painter could find no truer way of expressing him than by flinging on the canvas the radiant vision of an Apollo, are poignant memories. We are glad that we should have them, yet they bring a stab of pain for that lost high spirit which life inevitably dashes.

With us all, the good ship Youth sets forth merrily with sails taut and pennons fluttering, filling to the wind and breasting the waves! We know that inevitably the storm winds must catch her; that she will be beaten by breakers; drawn out of her course by false currents; that if she become not a derelict, if she does not founder with all hands, she must—too often—cast much of her treasure overboard, furl her white wings, and come creeping into a cold harbour. Even those who, like our rare and wonderful friend, have gathered glory and dignity and power, as they plough a mighty course, have passed from under radiant skies into the gloom of the storm. A sombre thing, the human span, at the best, and most blest nowadays.

What can we say of the fair craft that founders almost as soon as launched? Ah! the young ghosts in that London drawing-room! The sound of the children’s voices yet ringing in our ears! There is “Mustard-Seed,” the splendid little fair boy, who had been the favourite of our Shakesperian revels nine years ago—not yet nineteen, not a month a soldier—shot through the head on that Flanders field, the graveyard of England’s choicest! And the little Scotch lad, who used to prance about in his black velvet suit, with cheeks that shamed the apple—no one knows where he lies to-day; only two or three saw him fall. And his graver, gentler brother—a prisoner, even as we write in the first agony of the grief which has befallen him in the loss of his life-companion!

And out of a merry group of Irish children, irresponsible, high-spirited, noisy, two brothers sleep in that alien earth—now for ever English—“where their young dust lies,” as the poet who wrote so prophetically of his own fate has beautifully said. And yet another is wounded, and another invalided; and the once merry sister, whose gallant husband was left wounded on the field and was missing long weeks, still mourns him as a prisoner.

Of the rest of the company, those companions of our daughter’s own unclouded childish days, some are widows; and some can scarce meet the morning for apprehension of its news, or return to their homes for fear of that orange envelope that may lie on the hall table, or sleep in the night for listening for the sound of the bell. And some are in the Dardanelles, under skies of brass, treading on earth of iron, and some are in those trenches, deep-dyed and battered a hundredfold. Two more brothers—the elder twenty and the younger nineteen—fell within a month of each other. A few are still on English soil, light-heartedly preparing for the great fray, straining like hounds at the leash, staring with bright, impatient eyes towards that goal with its unknown and terrible possibilities; cursing the slow flight of time. Of these one thinks, perhaps, with a heart more tightened than of all the rest!

The reaper has come forth to reap out of season, and the young corn is mown down in the green ear, and all the poppies and the pretty flowers go down with it.

Sitting in rooms which we had not revisited since before the war, these are sad thoughts that the crowded recollections bring.

London itself, however, seemed little changed; even that much-discussed night-darkness hardly noticeable. Driving in the daytime we instinctively counted, with frowning glance, the number of stalwart young men out of uniform, and wondered how any girl could walk with them, much less smile upon them. And our eyes followed the soldiers with pride as they marched by, singing popular catches to inspire themselves in default of the band which the stern necessities of this war forbid. What fine fellows they are—so well set up, looking out with such steady vision upon the future which they have chosen! And the lilt of the merry tune, with what a deep note of pathos it strikes upon the ear!

Of course there are a great many soldiers about London, yet no more than in Jubilee time, and there is no greater excitement among them, and a good deal less among those who watch them pass, than in the days when it was all pomp and circumstance, and no warfare.

London does not carry the stamp of war about her, but we carry it each one of us in our hearts. That is why we sicken from the music-hall posters; why wrath and grief mingle in our minds at the sight of that bold-eyed community with its whitened face, its vulgar exaggeration of attire, and its unchecked and unashamed hunting of its prey; a prey sometimes visibly unwilling, sometimes pathetically, innocently flattered!

The Zeppelin menace has created no sense of apprehension in the town. The first night of our arrival we conscientiously prepared amateur respirators for ourselves and such of the famiglia as accompanied us. Pads of cotton-wool, soaked in a strong solution of soda, were placed within easy reach of the bedside. The next night we said “Bother!” and the third night we forgot all about it. Though the Signora, lying awake, had occasionally a half-amused speculation whether the throbbing passage of some more than usually loud traction-engine, or the distant back-firing of a belated taxicab, might not be the bark of the real wolf at last!

Our little white-haired housemaid, generally left alone to mind the London house, possesses this philosophic indifference. She made herself a respirator. We doubt whether she ever thinks of placing it handy. We believe she shares the view of the old nurse of a friend of ours into whose garden a bomb really and truly did drop during the recent raid on Southend.

“Frightened, miss? Lord bless you, no! I knew it was only them Germans!”

Nevertheless, though London is neither alarmed nor depressed, we set our faces towards the Villino again with a sense of relief. These days it is better to be in one’s own place; and in London we feel only visitors now. Yet, strangely, the country is far more full of the war than the town.

Beginning at Wimbledon, we meet motorcars filled to overflowing with bandaged, bronze-faced young men, who smile and wave their hands as we whizz by. Dear lads! Some from that greater England beyond the sea, more closely our brothers now than ever before, with ties cemented by the shedding of blood. Blut-Bruderschaft, indeed, you have pledged with us: a Teutonic rite put into practice after a fashion our enemies thought out of the range of possibility.

And presently we come to the camps. Here, where the pine-woods solitary marched, where the heather was wont to spread, crimsoning and purpling to the line of blue distance—a wonderful vision of wild scenery—here is a brown waste, peopled with a new town. Rows and rows of wooden huts run in parallel lines. Where the trees stood you cannot even guess; but once and again there is the smell of the raw wood, and you see a giant lying lopped of his branches. And the whole place swarms in activity. We pass hundreds of ammunition and gun carriages—the two-wheeled carts for the new howitzers—some already with the guns in place; long sheds where half a dozen smiths are busy shoeing, with groups of patient horses, shoulder by shoulder, waiting outside; we hear the clank of iron upon iron from within; we catch the vision of red fire upon the sleek flank and the brawny arms wielding the hammer. Horses everywhere, it seems—lines of them, picketed; horsemen coming and going: detachments riding up and down among the thickest dust that you have ever imagined; and waggons lumbering, some charged with fodder, some, as we pass, with loaves fresh from the baking. And now a traction-engine, filling the air with noise and smoke, driven by two grimy Tommies who shout at each other as they throb and bumble along, has to be dodged and left behind.

This is an artillery camp—a marvellous place which gives one a more vivid impression of England’s strength, of England’s new army, than any words can describe. These splendid, happy, vigorous, busy men; these rows of howitzer and ammunition carts; these thousands of sleek, lively horses; this untiring, determined movement of work and preparation ... all for the Dardanelles, we hear.

We get out of the dust and the noise and the gigantic stir, and along the green roads again; and then into another camp. A curious stillness here: the myriad huts are all shut up, the sheds empty, even the new shops seemingly untenanted; only here and there stands a stray khaki figure to emphasize the loneliness. They left for the front the day before yesterday. To-morrow twenty thousand new men are expected, like a new swarm of bees, to take their place in the vacated hives.

Home again in the Villino, with all the fur babies washed and waiting for us. Rather a silent group of dogs, a little offended because we went away. Loki, who generally screams with rapture, has certainly a reservation in the ecstasy of his greetings; but Mimosa clings to us with two little paws, like a child hugging a recovered treasure, and offers kisses, of which she is not generally prodigal. Plain Eliza is shy. She has grown perceptibly in three days.

The garden is full of sweet scents. The dawn, the coronation, and the crimson ramblers are bursting into lovely bloom beside the blue of the delphiniums.

There was always a special kind of joy in the old days about home-coming to the Villino. We used to go from room to room, taking stock of the dear, queer little place; greeting the serene, smiling Madonnas; the aloof angels folded into their prayers; pagan, pondering Polyhymnia in her corner of the drawing-room, brooding upon the glory of times that will never be again.... It is all just as it used to be: bowery, without and within, as usual.

Everything is scrubbed to the last point of daisy freshness and polished to spicy gloss against the Padrona’s return, and smiling damsels await compliments on the stairs. Other years, as we say, these were moments of unalloyed light-heartedness. It was always unexpectedly nicer than we had imagined.

“Isn’t it dearer than ever?” we would say, then, to each other. “Don’t you love it? Aren’t we happy here?”

This year it is another cry that rises to our lips.

“Oh, how happy we might be, if only——”

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND