express by his carriage that he accepted no responsibility whatever
for the souvenirs. He didn't want the things, not he! They were
_there_, certainly, and--well, yes, he was carrying them, but _why_
he was carrying them (here he would have shrugged his shoulders if
he could) he really couldn't tell you; it was a matter of absolute
indifference to him, anyway. Histrionically I have no doubt it was a
great piece of work, but the only possible inference anybody could
have drawn was that he might have been carrying them to oblige
me--which I resented.

Heavens, how our arms ached, for it was over two miles to the billet!
A collision of milk-trains could hardly have made more noise than we
did as we clashed and clanged down the main street. Of course we met
everybody we knew. People we hadn't seen for years, people we didn't
like, people who didn't like us--all seemed to have been paraded
especially for the occasion.

We got home in the end, and it was a great triumph. The only
unenthusiastic person was Mr. Brown, my batman, who surveyed the
things in silence, betokening that he knew quite well he would be
called upon to sew them up in sacking and label them "Officer's Spare
Kit, c/o Cox and Co." Then he looked sadly at my soiled tunic and my
British warm and asked if I had carried them far.

"Over two miles," I replied proudly. "Pity," he said; "there's a whole
dump of them at the bottom of the garden here."

There the matter might have ended if the fat Roley had not lurched
up again the next day with a steel box containing a dial-sight off
a field-gun. The dial-sight was a complicated affair of prisms and