bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and
making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his,
the "Joy de Vive."

There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The
Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some
modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the
night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening.
They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English
country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread
out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram
lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour
waters.

"Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no
satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular.

"Don't mention it," said Platt.

And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past
the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping
of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the
ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels
and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr.
Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun
could shoot.

The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an
old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In
those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had