Scion kept his head and his nerve, and made good. A corporal's stripes
aren't much, but they're something."

Better was to come. There was high triumph in the Little Red Doctor's
expression when he came to my bench with the glad tidings of young
David's promotion to a sergeantcy.

"While it's very gratifying," I remarked, "it doesn't seem to me an
epoch-making event."

"Doesn't it!" retorted my friend. "That's because of your abysmal
military ignorance, Dominie. Let me tell you how it is in our army. A
fellow can get himself made a captain by pull, or a major by luck, or a
colonel by desk-work, or a general by having a fine martial figure, but
to get yourself made a sergeant, by Gosh, you've got to show the
_stuff_. You've got to be a _man_. You've got to have--"

"Are you going to tell her?" interrupted the Bonnie Lassie who had been
sent for to share the news.

The Little Red Doctor fell suddenly grave. "She's another matter," he
said. "I don't think I shall."

Matters were going forward with Mayme--beg her pardon, Mary McCartney,
too.

"Better and more of it," she wrote the Bonnie Lassie. "They rang me in
on one of their local Red Cross shows to do a monologue. Was I a hit?
Say, I got more flowers than a hearse! You've got to remember, though,
that they deliver flowers by the car-load out here. And the local stock