The snow was meaning to have a good time of it; there was no question about that. Further work in the clearing line was obviously impossible.

Virginia tilted up her coal-scoop in the porch, beside the pathetic remains of small brass shovel No. 1 (which broke in half quite early in the proceedings), and small brass shovel No. 2 (which also was giving wobbly indications of impending collapse). Ursula, possessing the only serviceable tool in the whole collection, had with unusual forethought carried in the kitchen shovel, and hidden it surreptitiously—realising that it was a much-coveted treasure at that moment.

But she did suggest that if we just took the ladder upstairs and let it down out of the end bedroom window she could climb down, and that would bring her close to the wood shed; she could get from the roof of that on to a low wall, and walk along the wall to the gate, which she would then climb over (as it was blocked each side with snow), and in this way she could get out into the lane to the spring of water, and bring back a can of water by the same route. This she would tie to a cord let down from the bedroom window, which could then be hauled up. Then she would get into the wood shed—which would not be difficult, as the door opened inwards, and would not be blocked by the snow on the inside; getting together some logs, she would next lash them up so that they also could be hauled up like the water; finally, she would herself return, vi the roof and the ladder and the bedroom window, to the bosom of the family.

This suggestion was received with gratitude, only everyone else wanted to take Ursula’s place, and make the tour instead of her. We pointed out to her that, as she had already meanly annexed the only workable shovel, she ought at least to relinquish the rÔle of leading lady in this expedition. We might have wasted much time in arguing with her had not Eileen reminded us that the ladder—like everything else we needed—was up the garden safely snowed up under the laurel hedge. So that project fell through.

“We may as well leave that collection of old metal in the porch,” said Virginia, “since there is no fear of callers arriving and putting us to the blush this afternoon.” Then there was nothing left to do but to stamp off the snow, and shed rubbers, and ulsters, and scarfs, and woollen gloves, and possess our souls in patience indoors, till such time as the snow should give over.

“And to think how I’ve always prided myself on going away from home prepared for every emergency!” sighed Virginia. “My dressing-case is simply crammed with such valuable data as a bandage for a possible sprained ankle, court plaster, a pocket-knife with a corkscrew on it, a specially strong smelling-bottle for fainty ones, a nightlight, a box of matches, ammoniated quinine, wedges for rattling windows, a box of tin-tacks—no, not a hammer, I always use the heel of my shoe—a two-foot rule—what should I want that for? I’m sure I don’t know, but then you never can tell! But with all my precautions, it never occurred to me to pack a spade and broom in with my luggage. This snowstorm has shown me the weak points in my outfit.”

“It has shown me the weak points in my joints,” groaned Ursula. “And, moreover, I never knew before how many parts of us there were that could ache. I’m just painful from head to foot. I never realised what a noble, self-sacrificing calling snow-shovelling is. And when I think of the men who come round in town, offering to sweep the snow from the path—and a good long path too—for a few pence, it seems a positive scandal that they should get so little. I’m sure there is quite ten shillings’ worth of me used up already!”

We certainly did ache. And only those who have been suddenly called upon to attack a bank of snow, with inexperience and feeble tools, can know the extent of our stiffness. We were content to let it snow, without the slightest desire to crick our backs any further. And after all there is something exceedingly restful and soothing to over-worked brain and over-strained nerves, in merely sitting in a low chair by a roaring fire, taking only such exercise as is required to put on an extra log, secure in the knowledge that neither telegram, nor visitor, nor any communication whatsoever from the outside world can possibly break in upon the quiet and peace. You need to spend your life in the heart of the great metropolis, amid the never-ceasing turmoil of London streets, with your days one long maddening distraction of callers, telephone bells, endless queries and perpetual noise, to appreciate the joy of the solitude in that snowed-up cottage among the hills.

---

For long months and months the guns in Flanders had sent a muffled boom over my London garden every hour of the day, and had shaken my windows violently every hour of the night; and there is no need to set down in writing the ache and the anxiety that each dull thud brought to the heart. Every one who has husband or brother or son out yonder knows what question comes wafted over each time the guns send out their deadly roll.

But our craving for quiet was not a desire to get out of earshot of the guns. It dated farther back than the War; it was the inevitable outcome of the over-wrought hurry of the twentieth century, when one’s nerves get so frazzled in the vain attempt to do everything, and do it all at once, that at last life is simply one intense longing for that “nest in the wilderness” out of reach of the clamour of the market-place and the vain, foolish, soul-wearing struggle for material things.

In that enchanted period of life, known as “before the War,” we used often to discuss the desirability of moving to an uninhabited island and spending the rest of our days there in unalloyed peace. It had been an absorbing dream with me, ever since I first read Sarah Orne Jewett’s book, The Country of the Pointed Firs. I dare say it was selfish to think of being quite out of reach of the noise and dirt and bustle and din of cities, and where there would be no next-door piano, and no gramophone in the house the other side, and no soots floating in the windows—but it was a very pleasant one, and I used to add to it occasionally by imagining what it would be like to wake up one morning and find that some unknown but generous friend had left me an uninhabited island as a legacy; one not far from the mainland, and somewhere around the British Isles, of course.

When such a thing happens, it will find me quite prepared, for we have built the house there, and furnished it, and mapped out our life there many and many a time; all I am waiting for is—the island! That seems hard to come by! I’ve had one or two offered me (not as gifts, but to purchase), like Lundy, for instance, but they cost too much and are not uninhabited. So we have still to content ourselves with plans only.

We were recalled to The Island (we always refer to it in capital letters) as we sat round the fire, by Virginia inquiring what books I should take with me when I moved there. She said she concluded that, being a booky sort of a person, a library would be an essential.

But I set my face firmly against taking unnecessary literature. My house gets choked with books, ninety per cent. of which I never open a second time. I am for ever turning them out, and yet they go on accumulating. Virginia has a perfect mania for hoarding impossible books, that she could never find time to read through again if she lived to be the age of Methuselah; yet she keeps them all, on the chance that some day she may require to refer to a solitary sentence in one of them. Her cupboards are full, and her shelves are packed behind and before, and she has had sets of drawers made just to hold “papers”; which means hundredweights of abstruse pamphlets, and learned magazines, and cuttings—well, I dare say you know the sort of girl she is, and what it’s like when their flat gets spring-cleaned, and she insists that no one must lay a finger on her books!

Ursula isn’t much better; but at least she is more practical, and believes in spring cleaning; hence, in her case, she does have a turn-out occasionally, and just throws away indiscriminately whole shelf-loads of books in a fit of desperation, when she has managed to get every article in the flat jumbled up in a heap in the room it has no business in, and no one can find anything. I believe at such time she surreptitiously disposes of some of Virginia’s tomes, too; but this I only suspect. At any rate, Virginia is always bewailing a number of “most important books” that never can be found after one of Ursula’s domestic upheavals.

Knowing all this, I said that only a definite number of books would be allowed on The Island. Both girls said it would be impossible to fix any limit that would meet the case. I said I was quite sure humanity, more especially the intellectual feminine portion of it, could do with far less books than they thought they could.

Vehement protests!

Then I suggested, to prove my words, that we should each start to make out a list of the books we couldn’t possibly do without on The Island—only those we couldn’t possibly do without—and see what it amounted to. “Jot down any book or author that occurs to us as being essential, irrespective of any sort of classification,” I said. “And we had better compare notes every ten books, as we go along.”

Forthwith, we each scribbled down our first ten absolutely indispensable books (they were to be exclusive of religious and devotional works). When we compared notes in a few minutes’ time, these were our lists:—

• EncyclopÆdia.
• A Dictionary.
• Jane Austen’s Novels.
• “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.”
• A Time Table.
• Franklin’s “Voyages.”
• “Punch” (regularly).
• A good Atlas.
• “The Spectator” (regularly).
• “A Child’s Garden of Verse.” R. L. Stevenson.

• A good Guide to London.
• A large selection of Needlework and Crochet Books.
• My old Scrapbook.
• Mudie’s Catalogue.
• An Almanac giving the changes of the moon.
• “The Old Red Sandstone.” Hugh Miller.
• The Stores Price List.
• Mrs. Hemans’ Poems.
• The Scottish Student’s Song Book.
• Kipling’s “Kim.”

• All Ruskin’s Works.
• “The Wide, Wide World.”
• “The Country of the Pointed Firs.” S. O. Jewett.
• All my Gardening Books and Florists’ Seed Catalogues.
• All my Wild Flower Books.
• “A Little Book of Western Verse.” Eugene Field.
• Poems by Ann and Jane Taylor.
• All my Cookery Books.
• All the Board of Agriculture’s Leaflets.
• A Book on Deer Culture.

Of course, we each gazed in profound surprise and contempt on the others’ lists, and asked why this and that had been put down. Why did Ursula want a guide to London, when the object of going to The Island was to get away from London?

She said she thought you ought to keep in touch with things even if you were away; and if it came to that, why did I want a Deer book, since I couldn’t look at venison?

I said I felt it in me that I should start keeping deer as soon as I landed, and there was more sense in doing that than in reading a Time Table, for instance!

Virginia protested a Time Table was absolutely essential, else how would you ever be able to get away when you wanted to? And you never knew when you might be summoned to anyone’s funeral in a hurry, and was she supposed to be cut off from all human enjoyment? Whereas no one could possibly want a Student’s Song Book, when they couldn’t sing two notes in tune; and, also, why Mrs. Hemans, might she venture to ask?

“Yes, who would dream of carting around a Mrs. Hemans in these days?” I scoffed.

“The frontispiece engraving of Mrs. Hemans always reminded me of mother’s Aunt Matilda,” said Ursula impressively. “I only saw her twice, but on the first occasion she gave me a doll, and on the second a blue and white bead necklace; I’ve got three of the beads left, in my workbox. And I’ve always loved beads, and I loved her in consequence, and I wouldn’t dream of being parted from Mrs. Hemans. And, in any case, why bring a Dictionary?”

“Because I may require to look up a more expressive word occasionally, or enlarge my flow of vocabulary,” Virginia explained. “And I conclude I’m not expected to be absolutely dumb when we get there!”

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that these are necessarily the books we should have named had we sat down thoughtfully to compile a list most representative of our tastes and needs; but whatever list I had made, I’m sure I should have included the volumes I named; and it goes to show that the books that make an individual appeal to us are not necessarily those that our friends expect us to name.

The library catalogue was never completed, for, before we had time further to criticize each other’s preferences, we were pulled up short by a sound.

We all stopped our chatter on an instant, for surely and certainly there could be no mistaking it, there was the ring of an iron spade chinking on stone! When last we had looked out, just after breakfast, not a stone had been visible for a spade to chink against in the whole vicinity. We flew to the door, and there, touching his hat with a smiling “Good morning, ma’am,” stood the elderly handy man who ought to have been in bed with his bad cold; and behold, a clear path to the lane. He had worked from the gate inwards, and we had been so busy with our discussions indoors, we had not heard him till he reached the porch.

“I was only able to get down downstairs yesterday,” the invalid explained. “But in any case it wasn’t no good coming over till that spell o’ snow was down, even if I’d been fit to come out.” Then, after a detailed description of symptoms and sufferings and so forth—“Yes, I think there’s a good bit more to come down yet. Nothing won’t be able to be got up from the village yet awhile; they tell me the drifts is eight feet deep in places. Maybe in a few days I’ll be able to get down. I’ll be wanting some sharps soon myself for the fowls, so I’ll have to try and get down by the end of the week. And the butcher’s killing himself this week, I could bring you up a j’int. I’ve knocked up a good bit of kindling wood in the wood shed, so you’ll be all right now.”

Yes, we were all right now, from one point of view; but I devoutly hoped he would not wait till the end of the week before he went for those “sharps,” for I had discovered that we had only one loaf in the house! And as they only bake twice a week in our village, and everyone knows how long war bread won’t keep, I need only add that already we had to cut off all the outside before bringing it to table, and by to-morrow it would be quite gorgonzola-ish right through!

As soon as he had gone, Ursula burst forth, “Don’t talk to me any more of the rights of women”—no one had been, but we let it pass—“don’t tell me they are the equals of men, and that all they want is a good education and scope for their energies. Look at us, haven’t we all had good educations?” (Ursula and her sister are thoroughly acquainted with the literature of several European countries; they read Plato in the original; and can give you reliable information on such points as the similarity between the tribes on the borders of Tibet and the Patagonians—if any exists. They can certainly be called well educated.) “And wasn’t there scope enough for our energies out there? And then consider what we accomplished! While a man like that comes along—says he never went to school in his life, just risen from a sick bed, too, so none too strong—yet in an hour or so he’s done what we should not have got through in a month. And look at the neat job he’s made of it, with the snow banked up trimly on each side; why, we were about as effective and as artistic as three fowls scratching on the surface of things. And then look at the stack of wood he got ready in no time. I’m sure I blushed to see him gazing at that collection of decrepit shovels standing in the porch——”

“And well you might blush,” edged in Virginia, “remembering how you selfishly stuck to the only decent shovel there was, with never so much as an offer to either of us to have a turn.”

“—Yes, we ought to have votes, we’re so—capable!” Ursula went on, but I begged her not to worry her head about votes just now, as the question of food was of greater national importance.

At the word “food” of course everyone was all attention, and we made ourselves into a Privy Council, and they appointed me Food Controller, because it would give them the right to do all the grumbling. But the matter was not quite as much of a joke as they thought. For so long they had been accustomed to a pantry stocked with bottles and tins and stores of all descriptions (and Virginia once remarked that to read the labels alone—if you had lost the tin-opener—was quite as good as a seven-course meal at a fashionable restaurant), that they forgot things were not like that now! In the dairy, too (which we use as a larder), it was the usual pre-war thing to see large open jam tarts in deep dishes, with a fancy trellis work over the top of the jam, and large pies with lovely water-lilies, made from the scraps of paste, on top, and spicy brown cakes, with a delicious odour, standing on the stone slabs—Abigail being a capital hand at pastry and cakes. The dairy is built on the north side, close under the hill, and the great stone wall that keeps the hill from tumbling down on top of the dairy is packed with hart’s-tongue and the British maiden-hair fern, and rosettes of the pretty little scaly spleenwort, and lacy tufts of wall rue, and practically every other kind of fern that loves damp shade and the English climate. And ivy runs over the lot right up to the top, where wild roses and honeysuckle and blackberry ramp about in the sunshine, and often peep down to see how it fares with their comrades in the cool ravine below. The long fronds of the fern wave in at the dairy window, and the ivy sends out little fingers, catching hold wherever it can, and creeping in, very much at home, through the wire-netting that does duty for a window. My guests always like to go into the dairy to see the wonderful array of ferns; but I sometimes suspect it is also to gaze on the appetizing-looking things that appeal irresistibly to all who have spent an hour or two in our hungry air!

But war had made a considerable difference alike to pantry and store-cupboard and larder, and we had to trust to the promise of Miss Jarvis, the lady at the village shop—and one of the most valuable members of the community—that we should not actually starve! As the stocks had been used, they had not been replenished. Cinnamon buns, lemon-curd cheese cakes, fruit cakes with a nice crack in the top, were no longer piled up in the larder. No home-cured ham, sewn up in white muslin, hung from the big hook in the kitchen ceiling. No large, dried, golden-coloured vegetable marrows hung up beside it for winter use.

We had plenty of potatoes, fortunately (and never had we valued potatoes as we did this year!), and we had the usual “remains” that are in the larder, when the butcher has not called for a few days and a family lives from hand to mouth, as one has had to do recently, lest one should be suspected of hoarding!

There was a tin of lunch biscuits, some cheese, and cereals; but the rest of the store cupboard seemed exasperatingly useless when it came to sustaining life in a snow-bound household. What good was a tin of linseed, for instance, or a bottle of cayenne, or a bottle of evaporated horse-radish (with the sirloin presumably still gambolling about somewhere in the valley)? Why had I ever laid in a bottle of tarragon vinegar, a bottle of salad dressing, a box of rennet tablets, a tin of curry powder, desiccated cocoanut, a bottle of chutney? Even the tin of baking powder and the nutmegs and capers seemed extravagant and superfluous. Oh, for a simple glass of tongue—but we had opened our only one the day we arrived!

One thing was certain: while the snow remained at its present depth, to say nothing of an increase, no provisions could be got up from the village. The steep roads were like glass the last time we were out; now they would be impassable for horses or vehicles, even though a man might manage to get over them somehow. Milk we could obtain from a neighbouring farm, perhaps a few eggs, possibly a fowl as a very special favour, now that our path was cleared; but that was the utmost we could hope to raise locally. The point to be considered was: How long could we hold out?

“Well, there is only one other thing I can think of,” said Virginia; “you must fly signals of distress, and hoist a flag up at the top of the chimney—they always do in books.... How are you to get the flag up the chimney? I’m sure I don’t know if you don’t! What’s the good of being an editor if you don’t know a simple little thing like that?”

But the problem was solved for me by a tap at the door, and then one realised the superiority of the servants of the Crown over all ordinary individuals. It was the postman. He said “Good morning” with the modest air of one who knows he has accomplished a great deed, but leaves it for others to extol.

“I’ve brought up the letters,” he said; “but I couldn’t get up the parcels to-day. There are a good many.” I knew what that meant. My post is necessarily a very heavy one, more especially when I am away from town, and great packages of things are sent down daily. “Is there anything I can take back with me?” he inquired.

I hastily scribbled some telegrams on urgent matters, glad of this chance to get them sent off; and I knew the Head of Affairs would be glad to hear we were all well. As I handed them to the man, he rather hesitatingly produced a bulky newspaper parcel that had been hidden under his big mackintosh cape, with an apologetic look, as it were, to the Crown, that the garment should have been put to so unofficial an use. Then in an undertone, lest the Postmaster-General in London might overhear, he said—

“Miss Jarvis was afraid you might be running short of things.” The thoughtful Lady of the Village Shop had sent up a loaf, a piece of bacon and a pound of sugar. How I blessed her!

Next day he managed to get up some of the small postal packages. The first one I opened was from one of the Assistant Editors in town.

“I see in the papers that you’ve had a heavy fall of snow,” she wrote, “and as there was not a solitary line from you this morning, I’m wondering if you are isolated? At any rate, I’m sending you a home-made cake and a box of smoked sausages by this post (instead of MSS.) in case you may be cut off from supplies.”

“If that isn’t bed-rock common sense,” said Ursula. “Most intelligent girls would have improved the occasion by sending you newspaper cuttings with statistics of the latest submarine sinkings, to keep your spirits up.”

Another slight fall of snow was all the late afternoon brought us, not enough to spoil the newly cleared path, but sufficient to reveal the fact next morning that someone with large masculine boots had been promenading round the cottage, for there were the footprints, a clear track that even a detective could not have failed to see, leading from the gate to the outhouses, from the outhouses to the scullery door, from the scullery door to the best door (it’s absurd to call it the front door, because each side is as much the front as the other excepting the part that backs into the hill!), from the best door to the door with the porch, and so on, out of the gate again.

As none of us knew anything about them, we concluded the handy man must have returned, bent on some new errand of mercy. But he disowned them; had not been near the place since the previous forenoon, and the snow had not fallen till five o’clock. It looked exceedingly queer, not to say uncanny, and we recalled the fact that the dog had barked violently after we were in bed. So far as I knew, there was no resident on those hills who would think of wandering round the house after dark; and no tramp or odd wayfarer would ever scale those heights unless he had some very urgent reason for so doing, and had a definite destination. It is too stiff a climb to take on a casual chance of picking up anything; moreover, unless a man knew his way, he would soon lose himself. Though the footprints really perplexed me, I did not say very much about them; but Eileen did.

When Mr. Jones from a neighbouring farm arrived with milk, I heard the full description being given him at the kitchen door. He expressed due interest, and described a mysterious case he had just read about, in the weekly paper, of a servant who had disappeared from a house in London where she had been in service for years, and no trace of her had been found since. Eileen and he agreed as to the many points of similarity between the two cases.

When the lad from the butcher’s came to know what portion I wished to bespeak of the sheep they would be killing, come Friday, I heard Eileen once more going through the story of the footprints, combined with details of the missing domestic. He, in turn, told her how a burglar had been one morning in a house next door to his grandmother’s in Bristol, and how, when they chased him, he jumped right over the garden wall, into the very dish of potatoes his aunt was peeling for his dinner. (The pronouns were confusing, but I don’t think it was for the burglar’s dinner the potatoes were intended.)

The farmer’s daughter who came to inquire if I would like a fowl, after hearing the story, offered to lend Eileen a novelette she had just been reading, where there were footprints exactly like these; and in the last chapter it turns out that the footprints were those of—I forget who or what, but it was very enthralling, and Eileen gratefully jumped at the offer of the loan.

The old man who came to say that they couldn’t deliver any coals till the weather broke, remarked that he didn’t like the look of it at all, and said he should be quite nervous if he were she, and asked her if she had heard about the old woman who had been found dead in her bed in Yorkshire, died of cold, and fifty golden sovereigns tied up in the middle of her pillow? Eileen had not heard of it. The old man said it was as well to keep your eyes open, as there were funny people in the world, and this seemed to him just such another affair.

And much more to the same effect.

---

That night I was suddenly awakened by a sound, though at first I could not tell what it was. I lay wide awake, holding my breath: then it came again, a gentle rasp, rasp, as though someone were scraping something with a metal tool. At the same moment I heard Virginia and Ursula stirring in the next room. I stole in to them; they too were listening. And then we realised that the burglar had really come! From the direction of the sound we knew he was scraping away the putty, or something of the sort, from a pane of glass that was let into the scullery door. If he managed to get through that, he could undo the bolt, and would be free of the place.

What were we to do, we asked each other in whispers? Of course, previously, I had always known what I should do if a burglar ever came to my house. I should go downstairs, throw open the door and confront him unafraid, asking him in a firm but most melodious voice what had brought him to such a low moral depth, and urging him to better things. He would be so undone by the sight of me and the sound of the music of my voice, that he would crumple up at my feet and confess all his past burglaries. Whereupon, I should motion him to come in and take a seat, while I hastily prepared a cup of Bovril, and cut him a large plate of cold roast beef; and on his observing that I had passed him the mustard pot without first removing the silver spoon, he would be so overcome by my confidence in him that he would voluntarily vow to turn over a new leaf. He would leave with half-a-crown in his pocket. And years afterwards a prosperous man would knock at my door, bearing in his hand half-a-crown, etc.

But this particular case did not seem to fit in with my previous programme for the reception of burglars. In the first place there was no Bovril in the house; and secondly, there was no beef, only a tiny piece of cold mutton in the larder—and you can’t do anything heroic with only cold mutton.

Meanwhile the man was scraping away downstairs, and we did not know but what he would be in upon us any moment.

“Shall we let the dog loose?” said Virginia.

“The dog!” I repeated. “Why, where is the dog? Why isn’t he barking?” Until that moment we had forgotten him entirely. There was no sound of him below; and he is a ferocious little thing if strangers come anywhere near the place.

“Oh, then they’ve poisoned him!” gasped Ursula, almost in tears. “They’ve got some poisoned meat in to him somehow, under the door perhaps, and he’ll be lying there a corpse, and we never thinking of him.” We all three crept as silently as we could downstairs, to find “the corpse” remarkably cheerful, with his nose at the crack of an outer door, every hair of his body on end with tension, his ears cocked up, and every muscle of him on the alert—but not a ghost of a bark did he give, only a perfunctory waggle of his tail, just as an acknowledgment of our presence, and an apology that he was too much engaged at the moment to give us more attention. There was not much poison about that dog! As the scraping got louder, and my teeth were chattering violently (but only with the cold, as I explained to the other two), I fled upstairs again, and they followed.

“What do you usually do when burglars come?” whispered Virginia.

“I don’t know. I’ve never had one before,” I moaned.

“Didn’t you once tell me you had a bell, or something of the sort?” said Ursula.

“Why, yes; I had forgotten that.” I keep a huge bell under the bed at the head, and I always intended to ring it violently out of the window if a burglar ever came. (Scrape, scrape, scrape, continued down below.) “I don’t suppose anyone on these hills would wake up to listen; but, at any rate, it might worry the burglar and send him off.”

“Let’s ring it now,” said Virginia eagerly, “and then, when he is well outside the gate, of course, we’ll let the dog run out after him.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “But first I want to go into Eileen’s room, and peep out of her window and see who is below. Her window is just over the scullery door, and is always open at night. If it is anyone from the district—though I don’t believe it is—I should recognise him.”

So we tip-toed into Eileen’s room, where she lay sound asleep.

“When I give the signal, you ring,” I said.

Cautiously, slowly, silently, I got my head a little further and further out of the window, shaking with ague from head to foot. And there I saw the burglar—he was Farmer Jones’s dog (alias the wolf, you remember), and he had got hold of a sardine tin that had been emptied that day. He was having a lovely time, licking that tin out, and as he licked, so it scraped and scraped on the stones. No wonder my own dog did not bark; he knew it was his ancient enemy without, and the instinct of the dog of war was to wait stealthily till the foe should get within his reach.

“Don’t ring the bell!” I whispered hoarsely, and we crept out of the room.

“I think it’s just as well Eileen did not wake,” I said, as we made ourselves a midnight cup of tea before turning in again, “for I’ve no desire to hear this episode being related all day long at the kitchen door!”

---

Have you ever sat by the fire indoors, when the ground has been covered with snow, and the sky grey and heavy, till you have been “absolutely perished with the cold,” and then someone has come and dragged you out (or, if you have wonderfully uncommon sense, you have dragged yourself out), and plunged right into it—a shrivelled-up martyr! After ten minutes spent in trying to sweep the snow from the path, what have you felt like?

I plunged right out into it—simply because the two girls were bragging such a deal about their own heroic fortitude in forsaking the fireside at the call of life’s stern duties, or something like that. But first of all I put on a knitted hug-me-tight; then my leather motoring undercoat; then my big cloth coat; and finally, my mackintosh. I tied on a woollen sports cap with a winter motor scarf; I turned up my coat collar, and put on a fur necklet; and, of course, I didn’t forget gaiters and warm gloves.

Then I stood on the doorstep and looked out—if you believe me, the cold went right through me, and fairly rattled my bones inside.

Still, I wasn’t going to be outdone in misery by the other two, and noticing that the bushes were actually breaking down under the load of snow, I seized a broom and sallied forth. After all, if one has to die a martyr’s death, one may as well occupy the final moments in doing useful kindnesses for one’s family.

It is some sort of solace to picture how they will eventually say, “To think of her doing all that, when——”; or, “To the last she never gave in; why only the very day——!”; or, “Ah! how often have I seen the poor dear——!” etc.

So I made for the pink rhododendron, that was suffering badly; being evergreen, its large rosettes of leaves, surrounding each flower-bud of the future, had caught and held great masses of snow; the lower branches were literally buried beneath the heavy drifts.

But as I found I couldn’t get at it without clearing a way through a three-foot bank of snow, I set to work with a spade. It sounds simple enough, I know; but unless you’ve been getting your living at snow-clearing, you would never believe what a lot there is to it, when you start to make a nice serviceable path through a drift from two to three feet deep, and six feet long.

I reached the pink rhododendron at last. Getting my broom against a main stem, I shook it gently. What a lovely shower came down! I don’t know that I needed it all over me, personally; nor was it necessary to choke up half the cutting I had just made. Still, down it came, white billows and a rain of silver powder. I never knew what snow was really like, till I shook it all over me, and the sun suddenly came out and turned the cascade to a gleaming white radiance.

Having got well smothered to start with, I decided I might just as well go on; and that I could dispense with the motor undercoat, which I left hanging on the bush. Lower down the garden I could hear the clink and scrape of shovel and spade against the stones, as the other two cleared the snow from the various little flights of rough stone steps that take you up or down, from one level of the garden to another. But I didn’t feel like clearing steps just then; it was too niggly. I wanted something bigger than that, and I somehow had a desire to work alone, so I struck a path that went up the garden, and began to work my way towards the top gate, clearing as I went.

As I bent over the smooth glistening surface, I was amazed to see the number of messages written there for those who know the language of the wilds well enough to read them! What a scurrying to and fro of little feet had been going on since the snowfall, all on the one quest—food and water! Birds innumerable had left their signatures; some I knew, some I could not identify, save that they were birds. Rabbits I could trace; stoats, too, might have made some of the writing in the snow; and there were bigger tracks—perhaps a fox.

Everywhere there were tidings of other wayfarers, other workers, other seekers—the many other dwellers who have their homes somewhere between the larch-woods and the weir. The moment before the place had seemed a frost-locked, deserted, uninhabitable waste of snow; now I saw it was teeming with life, brave, persistent, not-to-be-daunted life, that in spite of cold and hardship and privation and a universal stoppage of supplies, still set out, with unquenchable faith, on the quest for the food which they have learnt to know is invariably forthcoming, “in due season.”

The surprising thing to me is the fact that such small bodies can ever survive such a welter of snow. Aren’t they afraid they will sink down and be swallowed up in it? Have they no fear lest they lose their way, with the old landmarks obliterated? Doesn’t it strike terror to the heart when they find their doorway blocked, and themselves snowed up in burrow or hole? Yet, judging by outside evidence, it would seem that none of these things daunt them; an obstacle is merely something to be surmounted.

To my mind the most pathetic thing about it all is the fact that their chief fear seems to be fear of human beings, a dread of the very ones who could, and ought to, befriend them.

In my clearing I moved a small wooden box that had been used for seedlings, and since had lain unnoticed beside a hedge. Underneath a tiny field mouse had taken refuge. It seemed almost paralysed with terror when I suddenly lifted the box, and escape was blocked on every side by banks of snow. The poor little thing just sat up on its hind legs and looked at me most pitifully. I can’t say that I exactly cultivate mice, in an ordinary way, but—here was a fellow-creature in distress, such a little one too; I couldn’t have refused its appeal. I quickly put the box over it again, and clearing a space by the hole it had used as a door, I put down some bird-seed—I always carry something in my coat pocket for the birds—and I went away. Ten minutes later, every bit was gone.

---

Working my way round to another thicket of rhododendrons, that is a bank of purple and creamy white in June, once more I sent the silver-dust flying with my trusty broom. As one great mass came hurtling down, it so deluged me that for the moment I had to hold my breath, shut my eyes, and clutch on to a branch to keep myself from being buried under it. And then I heard a tragic whimper.

Turning round, I saw the small white dog, shaking himself out of the mass—and such a dingy-dirty object his passÉ white coat looked against the snow! I had left him indoors, a melancholy little figure, very sorry for himself, by reason of a swelled face. He will persist in lying with his nose to the bottom crack of the back door, irrespective of wind or weather, ever hopeful that a hare or a fox may come trailing by; and then—oh joy! what a turmoil there is within (he quite fancies he is “baying”), and what a scurrying of fur and feet without!

Having got him in, and rubbed him down, and wrapped him up in his favourite bit of old blanket, and given him a bone (which he couldn’t eat, poor little chap, but he had it in his basket with him, against such times as his mouth was in working order again), I returned to the garden—you couldn’t have kept me out of it now! I found I didn’t need the hug-me-tight, however, and I left it on the orchard gate.

What a work it was, tumbling over stone edgings one forgot were there, tripping over tree trunks and logs—the whole place seemed strewn with obstacles one never noticed until the snow covered them over.

I picked myself up continually, and worked on with my broom. Virginia came up once to point out to me my appalling lack of scientific method; but as I have never had any illusions on this point, it didn’t worry me. Ursula volunteered the information that I looked like Don Quixote tilting at a windmill, each time I attacked a bush or tree. I knew she was merely jealous of my ability. I’m not one to let a little thing like that deter me from my course of well-doing. I merely took off my fur necklet and thick motor scarf, and left them on a stile, so sunburnt was I getting beneath them.

And how grateful even the dry cracking twigs of the rose bushes seemed to be for the lifting of the load that bowed down one and all. The hollies had been trying bravely to hold up their heads, but it was hard work; every leaf had held out a little curved hand to catch a few snowflakes as they fell, and the total result was a mound that threatened to break the trees to pieces. They, too, shook themselves cheerfully, when I relieved them of their burden.

I could not do much to help the lesser plants; they were mostly buried beneath the snow, and I hoped they were the warmer in consequence. The poor wallflowers, that had been so sprightly with opening yellow buds when we arrived, now showed only shrivelled branches above the snow.

As I broomed my way towards the vegetable garden, I noticed that the birds were gathering near—they had kept away before, while the dog was about. But now the starlings began to shriek from the roof of the big barn. “Look at her! Look at her! What’s the use of wasting time on rose trees! No grub’s there! Look at her! Shaking snow down! Just as though there wasn’t enough on the ground before!”

“Oh, do be quiet!” shouted back a rook. “Just look at our nest! It would have been such an up-to-date affair, too; wife built it on the new war-economy lines—clever bird my wife is—only three sticks, you know; saves waste; and now look at it! Wife can’t even find the sticks!”

“Serves her right,” cawed a neighbour (a lady, I feel sure). “She shouldn’t have started so early—always trying to get ahead of everyone else with her spring cleaning!”

---

The sun had got the better of the clouds, and had changed the whole earth from grey to gold, from dead white to a gleaming brilliance, yellow in the sunlight, blue—undiluted blue—in the shade. I had seen blue snow in pictures, and had hitherto regarded it as an artistic exaggeration. But now I saw the blue with my own eyes on the north side of the walls and barns, and where long shadows were cast by the Wellingtonia, the hollies, and the evergreen firs. The mist still hovered over the valleys, and shut us off from the lower lands, but it was no longer cold and sombre; indeed, it was no longer mist at all; it seemed just light enmeshed, a liquid golden atmosphere.

The snow gleamed and scintillated with its diamond-dusted surface; the trunks of the Scots firs surprised one with the sudden warmth of red they showed when struck by the sunbeams, and the lovely colour still left in their blue-green foliage.

Far and wide the birds answered the call of the sun. Big pinions flew across the sky, casting shadows on the snow-scape as they passed; small birds darted in and out of holes in tree trunks, or crannies under the eaves; there was a cheeping and a chattering all over the garden and the orchard; while up and down the larches flitted the tits—the blue-tits swinging upside down, almost turning somersaults, as the notion chanced to take them; the coal-tits, any number of them, skipping about from branch to branch, never still a moment, always talking in their brisk little twitter; while over all there rang incessantly the “Pinker, pinker, peter, peter,” of the great-tit.

Near at hand, robin, my little garden companion, was having a good deal to say. At first I think he was reiterating what he had often said before: that he considered the dog a nuisance that ought to be banished from any properly conducted garden, since his habit of chasing every moving object within sight was disturbing, to say the least of it, to a conscientious worm-hunter.

Having finished on this subject, he began to talk about other things; but try as I would, I could not understand what he said; yet I knew he was trying to tell me something. He kept taking short flights over to the wall, and then back to some branch near at hand. “Twitter, twitter,” he kept on saying; yet he never even noticed the path I was clearing, back he would fly to the wall.

At last, as he impatiently fluffed out his feathers, perched on a white currant bush, till he looked like a ball, saying a lot more the while, I made my way through the snow to the wall. He darted after me, and stood on top of a mound of leaves that had been swept together last autumn, and left to stand till the spring digging should start. Being on the south side of the wall, and sheltered a little by the wide-spreading branches of a big Spanish chestnut, it had escaped a good deal of the snow, though it was frozen hard on the surface.

Here robin stood, and when he saw I was looking at him, he pecked several times with his beak at the solid mass. Then he flicked his tail and gazed at me. “Surely you understand what I want?” he said with his beady eyes. “No? Oh! how stupid human beings are! Well, watch me again!” Dab, dab, dab, went the small beak once more, without making the slightest impression on the ice-bound lumps.

Then I grew intelligent.

“Out of the way,” I said to him, and he flew to a low branch of the tree and watched me critically, while I drove the spade well into the mass.

“That’s right,” he chirped out excitedly, as I turned it over and got down to the softer portion, spreading the leaves about. “Why on earth couldn’t you have done that sooner!” as he swooped down to my very feet and seized something wriggly—gulp! I looked away.

What ninety-ninth sense is it, I wonder, that tells birds when food is about? One moment robin and I had the chestnut tree and its environment to ourselves. Next moment, directly I turned away, down came thrushes, and blackbirds, and starlings; and though robin put his foot down firmly, said it was all his, every worm of it, and dared anyone else to touch so much as a caterpillar-egg, or he’d know the reason why, he was outdone by numbers, and finally lost what he might have had because he considered it his duty to chastise Mr. Over-the-wall-robin, who had presumed to say that the leaf-heap belonged to him!

---

At last I got to the top gate, which is about one hundred feet higher than the lower part of the garden. What a wonderful world I gazed upon, so weird, so immensely mysterious it looked under the great snow covering. The valleys where the sun did not penetrate were entirely blotted out by soft mist. One seemed to be alone, high up in space, girdled about by white and grey, gold and mauve and steely-blue; I wanted to push on and on, to walk miles and miles, to fly if I could. The fact was, the exhilaration of the keen pure atmosphere was already beginning to tell on me, and was fast mounting to my head.

One thing I caught sight of on the opposite hills gave me pause for thought: it was a larch-wood in which every tree was blown so far over to one side, that there would be but little chance of their ever recovering or getting into the upright. I remembered that the handy man had told us trees were lying in all directions out in the main road. I decided to climb still higher up the hill and see what my own woods looked like. First, however, I took off the big coat, and left it hanging on the under bough of a larch inside the gate.

Out of the top gate I went, and along the lane that now showed a moderately hard path along the centre, where one and another had trampled it down. A few yards brought me to a field that in June is one dazzling, waving mass of moon daisies, mauve pyramidal orchises, rich purple orchises, quaking grass, and a hundred other flowers besides. Not a first class hay-crop, I admit; still, a fair-sized rick stands in one corner. And although it may not possess strong feeding qualities for cattle, this field has wonderful feeding qualities for mind and soul; I’ve lived on it many and many a day through dreary London fogs and amid dirty City pavements and sordid-looking bricks and mortar. And when town has seemed unendurable, with its noise and its hustle and its brain-and-body-wearying chase after the unnecessary, I’ve thought of the brook that slips out from among a great mass of Hard Fern in the birch and hazel coppice up above, and wanders across the orchis field, with ragged robins fluttering their tattered pink petals beside the sterner browns and greens of flowering reeds, and broad masses of marsh mint—that is a mass of bluey-mauve in August—spreading in big clumps and bosses wherever it can find a bit of damp earth.

I’ve shut my eyes in the noisy City train, and in a moment I’ve gathered a big bunch of the quaking grass, brown, with a tinge of purple, and the yellow stamens dangling from each little tuft. And the comfort that the brook and the orchises and the reeds and the under carpet of tiny flowers have brought me, has been worth more to me, personally, than the money that twenty haystacks might have realised.

But to-day the field was just one white sheet, like all the rest of the landscape. Along the south side of the wall the snow was not so heavy, and using the broom as an alpenstock, I plodded up the field—giving a wide berth to the place where the brook was down below—till at last I reached the woods, first a coppice of birch and hazel and oak, and adjoining it a larch-wood.

Once under the trees, the going was “all according”! It depended on whether the snow was still on the branches, or had come down in small avalanches to the ground beneath. But I determined to struggle on. I was warmer than I had been since the previous summer, and more pleased with life than I had been since before the War started. The larch-wood offered the easier travelling, since there are not the down-drooping, low-lying branches of sundries that are always catching at one’s hat and hair in the mixed woods. With the larches you know just what to expect and where to find it. The needles make a fairly soft carpet, brambles are rare, and all you have to do is to gauge the level of the lowest of the bare brown branches, and pitch your head accordingly.

I looked at the wood before I ventured in. Everything seemed as usual. The outside trees that border the field are mixed firs, pines, and Wellingtonia. These do not shed their leaves as the larches do, and they stood up strong and erect, save where the heaviest laden boughs were bending under their weight of snow.

For the first few yards the trees were normal, standing in orderly ranks, much like the aisles of an old ruined cathedral, wherein the snow has freedom of entry. Every twig, every cone, had its glistening decoration. When a gust of wind shook tree or branches, down came the snow, in powder for the most part, for the under branches broke the masses as they fell, and sent them flying in all directions.

Suddenly I emerged from the sombre half light of the wood, into brilliant sunshine, with clear space above. Yet—I wasn’t through the wood; what did it mean? And what were these great white masses that blocked all further progress? I had never seen this spot before, though I know every tree in that wood; to me they are like individual children.

Then I saw that what lay before me was a piled-up mass of trees, torn bodily up by the roots and lying in all directions one on top of each other. For a moment something almost akin to fear seized me, the awesomeness that comes over one when in the presence of a force that is utterly beyond one’s puny power to compass or restrain. Here was a footprint, indeed, of the storm that had done this stupendous thing.

The fringe of the wood all round was intact; the blizzard seemingly having swirled down, a veritable whirlwind, into the very centre of the plantation, tearing the trees out of the ground, and flinging them about in uncontrolled fury.

It was an impressive sight—even with the kindly snow covering up the wounds and the gashes, and doing its best to obliterate the harsh look of devastation that lay over the scene.

Retracing my steps, I ran into another explorer who was likewise trying to dodge a snow-bath round a tree trunk.

It was Virginia.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your meditations,” she said politely, “and I won’t detain you a moment. I’ve merely come to ask if you would mind lending me your rubbers—not your best ones you have on, but the second best with the seven holes in the soles and one heel gone—in order that I may go to the neighbours and borrow a slice of bread. ‘We ain’t like them as asks,’” she went on, quoting a favourite expression of a well-known whiner in the village, whose practice is to take without asking, “‘but it do seem hard when you see yer own flesh and blood a-crying for vittels.’ Not that I would presume to interfere with your household arrangements and upset your meals, but what with Ursula in a dead faint making her will, and Eileen packing up to return to her grandmother in order to get something to eat——”

“What’s the time?” I cut her short.

“It was two when last I saw the clock, but I’ve wandered miles since then in search of you, hence the fact that my own rubbers are worn out.”

Then I remembered that I had never mentioned the matter of meals to Eileen that morning; though, in any case, there wasn’t much that could be cooked till that sheep was killed, come Friday: we had naught but the remains of a shoulder of mutton.

“How did you find where I was?” I enquired, as we ploughed our way back.

“Footprints, oh, blessed word!” she said. “In any case, you shed your garments wherever you went, and thoughtfully left your coat hanging in the larch avenue; Eileen saw it in the distance and came shrieking to us that the burglar had evidently hung himself from a tree by the top gate!”

As there proved to be nothing at all on the mutton bone, we decided to reckon it a meatless day, and we sat down to a lunch of bread and cheese and coffee—each reading a cookery book the while. The Food Authorities surely couldn’t object to that!—and you’ve no idea what a fillip it gives to a war-meal, if you’ve never tried it.

Collecting cookery books, ancient and modern, being one of my hobbies, there was a fine assortment to choose from. I selected “Ten Minutes with my Chafing Dish,” and what that author did in the time you would never credit! My bread and cheese became, in turn, braised terrapin, crayfish omelette, creamed oysters with Spanish onions, escalloped chicken with mushrooms, and fricaseed trout with paprika sauce.

I had it all at the one meal, no questions asked about the number of courses and the ounces of flour, and it only cost me about sixpence including the coffee.

Ursula, who had annexed a 1724 volume, ate her frugalities to the accompaniment of Double Rum Shrub; but, as I told her, I was thankful I had been better brought up.

Virginia chose “The Scientific Adjustment of Food Values”; and, before she had got through the first chapter, started to blame me for giving them cheese and butter, when I might know that both contained a sweeping majority of proteids. Whereas, what she found she really needed was cheese and water-melon (though cantaloupe might take its place), and why wasn’t there water-melon (or cantaloupe) on the table? She had known all her life long that she needed it—always had an undefinable longing steal o’er her about twelve o’clock midday and again at four-thirty—but her want had never been made articulate before, simply because she wasn’t sure of the name of the missing link. Now, however, if I expected to retain my hold on their affections, she must really ask me to see that water-melon——

But I was too deep in the enjoyment of a dish of anchovy and caviare canapes at the moment to interfere. I left her at it.

---

In the afternoon, as we were short of milk, I suggested that we should go ourselves to the Jones’s farm in search of more. There was a beaten track along the lanes now, so we took the tin milk-can and started off uphill, thereby just missing the Head of Affairs, who came swinging up the road from the village. Having seen the finally departing back of the very last workman, he had caught the next train and arrived unannounced.

The wind was keen when he got up out of the valley, so he turned up his coat collar and rammed his cap well on his head. Finding the cottage door locked, he knocked briskly and started to inquire for me, when Eileen (whom he had never seen before, remember) opened the door in response to his knock. But, to his amazement, before he got a couple of words out, the door was banged to, in his face, and he was informed through the large keyhole—

“The lady is not—I mean—she is at home, but she is engaged; she is—er—she is entertaining friends and can’t see anyone.”

Exceedingly bewildered, the caller waited a minute, trying in vain to catch sounds of hilarity within, and then rapped again; and, as the keyhole seemed the correct channel of communication, he said through the aperture—

“Kindly tell your mistress that her husband is here.”

There was a pause, then the voice within said—

“The lady is sorry she can’t see anyone to-day, as she is ill in bed.”

The mystery thickened. Going round to the back door, which was also locked, the caller rapped more vigorously still. This time an agitated voice wailed from the inside—

“Are you still there? Oh, please go away!”

But, though he was exceedingly astonished at this curious reception, he had no intention of going, and he said so. Eileen’s next question was unexpected.

“What is your Christian name?” she began. He told her. “What is the colour of your hair?”

He proceeded to describe himself, and added—

“If you have any doubt about me, let the dog out, he’ll soon tell you if I’m a genuine case or an impostor.”

The dog was whining inside, and trying frantically to get out. The girl debated, and then said—

“All right; but you won’t mind waiting a minute?”

“Oh, not at all!” he replied, with sweet sarcasm. “I don’t mind in the least how long I stand here in the cold. I quite enjoy it.”

Then suddenly the door was flung open, and Eileen, holding a photo of the Head of Affairs in her hand, which she had fetched down from my bedroom, started to compare it carefully with the original.

“Yes,” she sighed; “you are something like it.”

But the visitor had walked in unceremoniously, with the joyful dog leaping around.

“Now,” he said severely, as he took off his coat. “Where is your mistress?”

Eileen looked mournful. “If you please, sir, I’m very sorry, but I told you a wicked story just now. The mistress isn’t entertaining friends”—that was self-evident, as the cottage living-rooms were empty, and it was hardly the kind of day one would choose to entertain friends in the garden—“and she isn’t ill in bed neither. She isn’t here at all. But I didn’t like to say so at first. I was afraid, not knowing who you were, and coming after the shock. Have you heard the awful news?”

“No!” exclaimed the harassed, hungry man, jumping to his feet again in alarm. “What’s happened?”

“Haven’t you heard?” and Eileen lowered her voice to an hysterical whisper. “We’ve discovered footprints!”

By this time the Head of Affairs was quite convinced in his mind that either the girl was not in the full possession of her senses, or else she had been to see a Robinson Crusoe pantomime, and it had turned her brain, so he merely said—

“Well, perhaps you’ll now try if you can discover some coffee, and that as quickly as possible.” And he dismissed her when he had ascertained where we had gone, as he was rather weary of the whole performance.

---

Meanwhile my guests and I were making a few neighbourly calls in passing. In a scattered community that is often cut off by the weather from intercourse with its fellow-kind, a little gossip is always welcome. Not idle gossip, I would have you understand; but talk on things of serious import. For instance, I was naturally very glad to learn from one of my neighbours that old Mrs. Blossom had not been secretly harbouring a German spy after all, as it turned out that the masculine under-vests that had been hung out each week lately with the wash really belonged to her late husband; and after cherishing them for five years, she had decided it was more patriotic to wear them herself at a time like this, than to buy herself new ones when wool was so badly needed for the troops.

It was a real satisfaction to get this mystery cleared up at last, as her clothes-line each Monday morning (when the weather was fine) had worried us greatly. When I say “us” I don’t mean myself necessarily, because I fear I hadn’t kept track of her washing as I ought to have done if I called myself a friend and neighbour. Most remiss of me, of course. Still, there it was; and I had no need now to creep along beside the hedge and take an inventory of her garments; neither need I fear for the safety of our hill.

Fortunately, with us time is of no importance, the clock really doesn’t signify, even if it goes, which isn’t guaranteed; we divide the day into three meals, which are regulated by the three trains that puff up the valley, week-days only. Sunday is more of a problem, if you have children to be got off to Sunday-school; but as Mrs. Jasper has the one reliable clock up in our corner of the hills, her children set the pace; and when Maudie Jasper’s starched China silk Sunday frock is seen to be coming along the lane, accompanied by other little Jaspers in Lord Fauntleroy blue velvet suits and a bunch of everlasting pea, blush roses and southernwood for teacher, then the two or three other cottages in the vicinity hurry up and add their quota to the little procession that walks decorously (so long as it is in sight of maternal eyes) down the hillside trail to the Sunday-school in the valley.

Of course awkward mistakes sometimes happen, as they do in the best of well-regulated families. It was so on the occasion of the first introduction of Daylight Saving. Naturally the weekly newspaper and the vicar and the schoolmaster, and everybody, had explained to everybody else that on a certain Saturday night the clock must be put forward one hour, etc. We are anything but behind the times on our hills, and no clocks in the whole of the British Isles were set forward an hour more eagerly than ours were; only, obviously, if you haven’t a clock that goes, you can’t set it forward; therefore our little corner looked feverishly in the direction of the Jasper clock, and frequently reminded the Jaspers of their national duty.

To make quite sure that the important rite wasn’t overlooked, Mrs. Jasper put the hands of the clock on an hour when first she got up on the Saturday morning, instead of last thing at night, as the authorities had decreed. An hour more or less made no difference to the family, seeing that it was Saturday and no school to be thought of. Meals came as a matter of course, and quite irrespective of clocks. Mrs. Jasper knew that if she didn’t see to the thing no one else would. So she got it off her mind nice and early.

Later in the day Mr. Jasper thought of the new official regulations re Daylight Saving; and knowing the uselessness of ever hoping to get a brain that was merely feminine to grasp any great truth as set forth in newspapers, he himself put the clock on an hour; as master of the house he regarded it as his peculiar office to see that the law was duly enforced. He didn’t mention the matter to his wife; what would be the good? And it wasn’t her concern anyhow; but as he shut the door of the clock, he wondered where indeed the household would be if it were not for him and his thoughtful habits!

Then there was Maudie Jasper. Being a bright child of twelve, brought up on modern educational lines, naturally she had no very high opinion of her parents’ intellects. Since it was she who illumined the home with the torch of learning, she felt it devolved on her to see that the clock kept abreast of current events. Besides, she was a shining example in the matter of Sunday-school tickets; she didn’t intend to be late next morning. So she, too, put on the hands an hour.

It was just as Mrs. Jasper was going upstairs to bed at night, tired out with the Saturday night bathing of the children, that the clock stared her in the face, and the question arose: Had she, or had she not, put on that clock an hour as she had meant to? Her memory isn’t good at the best of times, and she was especially done up with a day that somehow had not seemed nearly long enough for its accustomed duties, though she couldn’t make out why. But to make quite sure, she gave the hands a flick round; better be quite certain than have Maudie late for Sunday-school. Only she did wish they didn’t leave everything for her to do!

Next morning, when the Vicar drew up his blind at 7 A.M., as is his unfailing wont, he saw a small group of children standing forlornly outside the Sunday-school door, waiting for the 10 o’clock opening!

---

Mrs. Jasper’s was the next cottage we called at, to inquire after her husband, who was now at the front. Mrs. Jasper was delighted to see us, and of course asked if we had further news of the burglar, the fame of our footprints having spread far and wide. She told us all about the neuralgia in her head, and seemed much relieved when we assured her that it was not at all likely to turn to appendicitis.

She had had a lurking fear that if it became appendicitis, she would have to go to a hospital, and she hadn’t much belief in hospitals. There was her sister’s little boy Tommy, up in London, just four years old, and all nerves, as you may say; screamed and kicked like anything if you didn’t give him what he wanted the moment he asked for it. They couldn’t do nothing with him.

At last they decided to take him to a hospital; so her sister-in-law and “his” mother went with her. And what do you think the doctor said, after they’d told him the symptoms? “Temper,” he says; “just bad temper. Take him home, and spank him next time it comes on.” And that was all they got!—cost them fivepence each for car-fares too!

We asked after her own family. Maudie was getting on splendidly at school, “really a first-class scholard she is, although it’s I that say it. Can read the Bible beautifully now—or at any rate the Testament” (with a desire to be absolutely truthful). “And when I’m writing to her father, and can’t quite rec’lect how to spell a word, she can tell me two or three different ways of spelling it, right off pat!”

At the next cottage we stopped to inquire after a man who had met with an accident, which necessitated the amputation of one leg below the knee. Having given him all our own “Surgical Aid” letters, and fleeced our friends of theirs, I naturally asked why he wasn’t wearing the artificial limb that had been procured? (it was reposing artistically on the top of the chest of drawers in the kitchen, a stuffed sea-gull under a glass shade on one side, balanced by a wedding-cake-top-ornament under glass on the other). Wasn’t it comfortable? I asked. Didn’t it fit?

“Oh, yes’m, thank you; it fits beautiful. But that’s my best leg; and the missus likes me to keep it there where she can show it to everyone, and I only uses it for Sundays and Bank ’Ollerdis.”

Then we looked in on Mrs. Granger, a happy-go-lucky widow who is always passing round the hat. When we knocked at the kitchen door, she was pouring down the sink the liquor in which she had just boiled a piece of bacon. I couldn’t help asking mildly and deferentially: “Have you ever tried using the liquor of boiled bacon for making pea-soup? It’s very nourishing, as well as tasty.”

Mrs. Granger smiled at me indulgently. “Well, ma’am, seeing that I’ve buried two husbands and three children, no one, I fancy, can give me points about feeding a family!”

At Mrs. Jones’s we made a longer call; we simply had to, as we were wanting milk, and she made no move to get it, but merely stood talking. There was the mirror over the parlour mantelpiece, she particularly wanted us to see that. Arundel Jones (aged eleven) had smashed a hole right through the glass when practising bomb-throwing in there. But would you ever know it, the way Patricia (aged seventeen) had decorated it? And as we couldn’t think what to say, we looked long and earnestly at the bunch of artificial and rather faded roses from Patricia’s hat that had been stuck in the hole, with some green paint daubed around on the glass to represent leaves. Fortunately, Mrs. Jones didn’t wait for our opinion—took it for granted, indeed, since there could only be one opinion about such a masterpiece—and proceeded to ask what I thought could be done with so artistic a girl.

And that reminded her, could I tell her where she could write to in London for some Loop Canvas at a penny a yard? Patricia wanted to make some slippers for a young man friend of hers who was at the front, and sweetly pretty too, with forget-me-nots all over; but it said you must have penny Loop Canvas. She had asked for it in Chepstow, but they had never heard of it, the cheapest they had was 1s. 4¾d., and no loops in it at that. But, of course, you could get everything in London.

I had never heard of the canvas myself (and I thought I knew most that was going!), but in any case, she wouldn’t get any canvas at 1d. a yard now, I told her; she had evidently got hold of some very old directions.

No, she hadn’t; it was in last week’s Home Snippets, and she got the periodical out from among an assortment of similar data under the horse-hair sofa squab, to show me.

There, under the heading—

it described how to make a pair of wool-work slippers, commencing with “Get a yard of Penelope canvas.”

Then Mrs. Jones was uneasy about her step-daughter, Kathleen, who was in service near Chepstow. “The food’s all right; but the lady isn’t what I call a good wife—never thinks of brushing her husband’s best clothes and putting them away for him of a Monday morning, and yet I’ve never once missed doing that since I married Jones. And I assure you, when I married him, he hadn’t a darned sock to his back. I’m sorry Kathleen hasn’t a better example before her, for she’s inclined to be flighty. She’s got a week’s holiday next month, and nothing will do but she must go and visit her cousin, who is working at munitions in Cardiff. I say to her, ‘Cardiff’s a nasty noisy place; why don’t you go and visit your Aunt Lizzie at Penglyn, she’s so worried she can hardly hold her head up some days, and cries from morning till night; and would be thankful to have someone to talk things over with; or your father’s Cousin Ann at Caerleon, they’ve had a sight of trouble there, and never see a soul nor go out of the house from week end to week end; they’d love to have you.’ But no, it’s Cardiff she wants,” and Mrs. Jones sighed at the unaccountable taste of one-and-twenty!

“Ah, no one knows what an anxiety that girl’s been to me,” went on the buxom, good-natured woman, who in reality never makes a trouble of anything, and has been a real mother to Kathleen. “I sometimes wonder why I married her father! But there, I will say it looks better on your tombstone to have ‘The beloved wife of,’ rather than plain Martha Miggins (as I was), all unbelongst to no one, as it were.”

Don’t imagine for a moment that this implied matrimonial divergence on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, for a more contented couple you couldn’t find in the village. It is merely the polite way we have, locally, of discounting our blessings, lest we should seem to be flaunting our happiness in the face of less fortunate people.

“By the way,” she said, as we were going out of the door, “have you heard who it was walked around your place the other night? Well, now, to think I should have forgotten to mention it, but it was no one, after all, but the policeman! My husband was over to the police-station this morning about that mare we’ve lost, and he mentioned it; and, sure enough, the policeman had got it down in his book that he crossed the hill by our road that night, and had looked over your house.”

And then I remembered that there was a police-station in the next village, that did duty for a very wide area of miles. And it was usual for the policeman to patrol from one village to another, by various routes, last thing at night, ascertaining if the inhabitants’ doors en route were all duly locked. We were much relieved in our minds, and started for home discussing the situation, when Virginia suddenly said—

“Surely that is our dog barking further along the lane?”

We paused to listen.

“Yes, it is,” I said in surprise. “Whatever can he be doing out here?” and we hurried on; for the dog is a valuable one, and is never let out without an escort. A turn in the lane brought us face to face with a tall, familiar masculine figure.

“Why, wherever have you come from?” I exclaimed.

“I’ve just made my escape from the tame lunatic who seems to be in charge of the cottage,” said the Head of Affairs cheerfully, as he relieved Ursula of the quart of milk. “And I would suggest, my dear, that the next time you propose to turn your house into a sanatorium for ‘Mentally Deficients,’ you might give your family due notice. A shock like that isn’t good for one after climbing such a hill.”

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And he might not have been particularly mollified when, later in the evening, Eileen offered the following apology:—

“I’m very sorry, sir, that I kept you waiting outside all that time in the cold; only how was I to know you were a gentleman, sir, when you looked so exactly like a burglar?”

But, fortunately, in the interval he had discovered, in his dressing-room, a new-but-forgotten pair of boots, and a not-at-all-bad-considering-it’s-war-time overcoat; and, naturally, he was inclined to take a roseate view of life.

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