young Territorial artillery officers in courses of gunnery. You
know they work with my own beloved old fifteen pounders, brought
up to date with new breeches, recoils, shields, and limbers. For
months there was a brigade in Wellings Park, and I used to watch
their drill. I was like an old actor coming once again before the
footlights.... Of course it was only in the mathematics of the
business that I could be of any help, and doubtless if the War
Office had heard of the goings on in my study, they would have
dropped severely on all of us. Still, I taught them lots of things
about parabolas that they did not know and did not know were to be
known--things that, considering the shells they fired went in
parabolas, ought certainly to be known by artillery officers; so I
think, in this way, I have done a little bit for my country.

With regard to my friends, God has given me many in this quiet
market town--once a Sleepy Hollow awakened only on Thursdays by
bleating sheep and lowing cattle and red-faced men in gaiters and
hard felt hats; its life flowing on drowsily as the gaudily
painted barges that are towed on the canal towards which, in
scattered buildings, it drifts aimlessly; a Sleepy Hollow with one
broad High Street, melting gradually at each end through shops,
villas, cottages, into the King's Highway, yet boasting in its
central heart a hundred yards or so of splendour, where the
truculent new red brick Post Office sneers across the flagged
market square at the new Portland-stone Town Hall, while the old
thatched corn-market sleeps in the middle and the Early English
spire of the Norman church dreams calmly above them. Once, I say,
a Sleepy Hollow, but now alive with the tramp of soldiers and the
rumble of artillery and transport; for Wellingsford is the centre
of a district occupied by a division, which means twenty thousand