the Indian General Hospital at Jandola.

A doctor unlaced the fly of the tent and stood back to let the first four men enter. They emerged again slowly, bearing a stretcher on which, covered with a Union Jack, lay a stiff form sewn up in a brown blanket, and moving off a few paces, halted.

Four times was this repeated by successive squads, and then the whole party moved down the path picked out in white stones, which leads through the perimeter to where in a little fence of barbed wire lies Jandola's "God's Aore," extending apace the last few weeks, alas! a tiny bare plot of stony Waziristan soil on a plateau ringed with jagged hills.

As the funeral party passed out of the perimeter a knot of officers standing at the salute fell in and followed silently. Another red-tabbed, goldsplashed group joined in a little farther on, for the Force Commander happened to be in Jandola that day, and with three more Generals came to say farewell to these his officers at the finish of their last journey down.

The chaplain in surplice and stole stood at the head of a line of open graves, and as the stretoher-bearers, passing in where a mixed company of the Guides stood stiffly at the "present," laid their burdens down, broke into the opening words of the Burial Service

"For I am the resurrection and the life," saith the Lord."

The major, standing opposite

to the first grave, removed his helmet, and laying it on the ground at his feet, stood nursing his slung arm, whence the ripped-up jersey sleeve fell away in blood-stiffened tatters.

As he listened to the measured words, the haunting idea of telephone - bells and bullets came back once more, but this time the two distinct ideas fused and merged into one, until at last he understood, and understanding, felt a great comfort sweep over his soul.

Of course, the orderly's pieture had naturally recurred to his memory, with the familiar phrase

"Zum-un vur tu speak tu yeou, zur."

So that was why the dead man lying under the flag by the open grave yonder had looked up from his work and answered.

The picture of another orderly fashioned itself before his mind

"The golden pinions folded down, Their speed still tokened by the fluttered gown."

That suddenly breathless pause had been the dead man's realisation that this time the call was for him, and then had come the recognition of the caller. The meaning of that half-spoken, half-whispered word seemed very clear now: "Christ!"

Who else, indeed, but the Master and Friend of all the world should greet those who have made the supreme saorifice, out short the way of

purgation by mastering the lesson in their utter negation of the claims of self, laying down their lives as things of no value that others might thereby live.

The officers of the Guides stepped forward, and lifting the bodies off the stretchers, lowered them gently one by one into the graves, and the words of the Funeral Service passed on into what is the real farewell from this side:

"In sure and certain hope of the resurrection."

Yes, undoubtedly, the hope is sure and certain: almost the major thought he would word it, "in sure and certain foreknowledge."

The insistent clamour of the "why and wherefore" was hushed now, and things balanced in due proportion as he realised that life is after all a moment's space for a lesson to be learnt. He understood clearly at last that he was only here for just the

space of time his Creator designed for him, and that peace lay in the grasping of the relative values of this small world and the infinity of the other, and while doing with all one's might one's work in the world, yet guarding an everpresent realisation that the call, "Friend, go up higher," may come at any moment, a call to be answered cheerfully and with good heart.

Presently came the rattle of arms of the salute, and then as the fading purple of the hills changed to the indigo of coming night, the Guides' bugles broke out into the farewell strains of the "Last Post."

But the major felt that those blanket-swathed figures lying there would hear but little of it, for their ears would be filled with the sound of Azrael's reveille, the first call of the new day, since surely for such as these "the long night is over and the day at hand."

Summer has come to Mahsudland, and over the lowerlying stretches sweep hot blinding dust storms, while even up at Ladha, Piazha, and Sorarogha, the narrow rook tangis, where not so long ago you shivered in the icy blast of the northern gale under the soudding snow-clouds, are now pleasant shady halting-places where you may rest awhile on the road, and baring your head, mop a perspiring brow.

The clear far vistas of pineolad uplift and snow-topped peak are rarely visible in the dust-laden atmosphere-indeed the last time we saw Pir Ghal it seemed quite void of snow.

New troops are coming up the line, and the units of early days look daily for orders down. Leave has opened, and the rest - camps are crowded with batches of cheerful souls, bound for India, for Kashmir, and best of all, for Bombay,

en route for home. Ten days ago General Skeen and the bulk of the staff of Derajat Column, now officially deceased, passed through, and spent the night with us at Sorarogha, to say good-bye to the 2/76th and ourselves, at the corner of the camp where you see the Ahaai hill-tops.

The fields abound in Mahsuds returning to their villages and crops, though gangs of irreconcilables still snipe the pioquets now and then. One such collection of desperadoes started a battle with one of our camp picquets the other night, and kept it up well into the small hours, causing a hurried rush to bed in our funk-holes, since the camp was sprinkled impartially with friendly and enemy bullets.

But for some of us that was a memorable night, since we had appeared in orders for leave ex India on the conclusion of operations; and after weeks of waiting, that very afternoon wire had come through to say that might go.

we

us

We packed our scanty kits, and next morning saw sweeping down the road in the wake of the convoy picqueting troops. From Ladha, Piazha, Sorarogha, and every camp and pioquet in Mahsudland we sprinkled the road: drafts of cheering sepoys on foot, Indian officers on borrowed hospital ponies, British officers in twos and threes on horses and camels, double and treble staging, some pushing ahead, anxious only to shake the dust of Mahsudland off their VOL. CCVIII.—NO. MCCLXII.

feet, others more slowly, stopping from time to time to take a last look or a photo of some well remembered place of blood - stained memory, or to bare their heads in farewell near a peculiar - shaped rock or tree which they knew to mark the otherwise unmarked grave of one of those who had fallen by the wayside.

Clattering into Jandola in the afternoon, lo! a motor road and Ford vannettes in scores. We piled ourselves aboard on milk-vans, on ice-cars, in empty Red Cross motors, and raced through the Hinis tangi out into the foothills past Khirgi and Manzai, and so in the stifling heat of the evening to Tank.

All

Thence by car or rail across the Indus; and in carriages packed with kit and stored with ice, in the full blaze of the Indian hot weather, we sweated unto Bombay, and with fluttering cheque-books and wads of notes laid siege to the shipping offices. India seemed to be homeward bound with passages booked months and years before, and there seemed but little hope for us down from forgotten Mahsudland. So we had to hang about Bombay, waiting for some peaceful plutocrat to die or miss his train, and so leap from the pier-head into his berth.

But by degrees we got passages-some earlier, some not so early; and one of the lucky ones, I boarded the P. & O. mail, and saw on the deck above me that same cavalry man of the Hinis and Piazha, 3 I

Not

So 88 Bombay dropped astern, we searched out longforgotten boiled shirts and oreased dress-suits, and went down to many course dinner amid shimmer and rustle of satin and silk, buzz of voices, and all the longforgotten sights and sounds of civilisation.

We had all of us past experience of returns from war, and, needless to say, did not expect bands and red carpets or even the flowers that London flung into the ambulance cars in '15. But perhaps some of us had faint ideas that upon occasion we might be people of potential interest, and that should the subject of the frontier arise, less travelled folk (especially the fair sex) might say: "Oh, you're from Waziristan! How interesting! Do tell us something about it."

If you have struggled over a painful path off the beaten track, I suppose it is only

It was therefore doubtless for our proper and final chastening that the cavalryman and I fell in with the commeroial magnate at evening drink-time. After the manner of travellers, he inquired whence we had come; and the cavalryman, with possibly recollections of the Ahnai and half a dozen more fights at the back of his mind, answered modestly,

"Waziristan."

The magnate puckered his brow as though in doubt, and then with a flash of remembrance, replied—

"Ah, yes. There's going to be a show up there soon, isn't there?"

Through a haze I heard the cavalryman, a temperate soul, who drinks mostly water as a rule, call to the waiter for two large brandies and small sodas, ere he deftly turned the conversation into the paths of the fluctuation of the rupee.

I HAVE been thinking a good deal lately of an anecdote related by the late W. R. Le Fanu in his 'Seventy Years of Irish Life,' a book witty enough to be worthy of the great-grandson of Sheridan. The anecdote concerns Whately, when that distinguished scholar and logician was Archbishop of Dublin. The prelate was an able man, but eocentrio; and one of his eccentricities was a habit when entertaining his clergy of laying down in an authoritative voice paradoxes which always startled, and sometimes shocked, his hearers. Having accomplished this, which was his object, and after the puzzled clergymen had silently revolved in their minds the strange saying for a sufficient time, the Archbishop would proceed to explain it in such a way as to show that it was merely a truism turned inside out.

Once at a luncheon given at his palace in Stephen's Green to some of his clergy, his grace gave a sample of this habit of his. Speaking in a loud voice, which silenced all other talk at the table, he said, "Is it not strange that there should be no connection between religion and morality?" The confused and speechless spell, which usually settled upon the audience after such an observation as this from their Archbishop, was on

this occasion broken by a louder voice from the other end of the table. "If your Grace means," it said, "that there are heathen religions. which have no connection with morality, it is a truism; but if your Grace means that there is no connection between the Christian religion and morality, it is false." It was the Archbishop's turn this time to become silent-and angry. He gave no explanation of his statement; and perhaps he was right. For once he had met more than his match: the speaker was the Rev. John Jellett, then a youthful Fellow, and later a distinguished Provest, of Trinity College, Dublin.

Still I am sorry that Jellett's reply prevented Whately's explanation of his saying. And what I have been thinking of lately is what that explanation would have been. Is it possible he would have justified his proposition by pointing to the state of affairs in the land of his hearers' birth and of his adoption, Erin, the Isle of Saints?

To any one who knows that land there can be no doubt as to the fervour and devotion with which the working-class non-Saxon part of the population cherish their brand of the Christian religion. Not very long ago I spent a Sunday in Dublin. The evening before I