half out of the rippling water. Another behind crumpled up and dropped, and lay struggling a space ere stiffening out still in the vivid moonlight, and the rest melted into the rooks around as only tribesmen can. Next moment from beyond them came spurts of fire as bullets zipped past, cutting through the branches or burying themselves in the bank. The Mahsud never moves in a heap, he knows too much. The five in front had as many more in position at the foot of the hill to cover them.

For five minutes more the noise continued as the Baggy Breeches endeavoured to recover the corpses, an operation proving too expensive, since the Mahsuds by now had the stream well covered, and to advance into the light from the shadows was to reverse the rôle too much in the enemy's favour.

So Greene gathered his party and withdrew to camp, with the comfortable feeling that he had correctly estimated the value of the dusk and the enemy's counting ability in the matter of scattered bodies of men,

That night and for some nights after the signallers iddy-umptied continually, and the linesmen lay abed till the sun got warm, and then luxuriously descended to the river to catch snow trout with bent pins, praising the Baggy Breeches with liberal use of the G.S. adjective.

it were preferable not to do so barefooted.

When the noise was at its height around a very much unfinished picquet a hundred yards away, the orderly-presumably obsessed by Geneva Conventions returned and tried to take away the major's revolver, being most obviously unversed in the pleasant ways of Mahsuds regarding wounded men. This time the wounded man, firmly clutching the bone of contention in his sound left hand, refused with oaths, and the orderly departed discomfited.

Later, when things had quieted down somewhat, came various visitors seeking news of friends, and once a doctor came in to fix up the sapper's leg in a cradle, and put new bandages on the major. The subaltern he did not touch at all-it was too clearly a case of leaving well, or rather extremely ill, alone.

Still later, when the firing had died away, except for intermittent bursts on the high ground above, punctuated by occasional bombs, an assistantsurgeon came in for a final look, aud then, turning down the hurricane - lamp, departed again into the night to deal with the steady stream of wounded still coming in.

The sapper by this time had slipped into the blissful coma of morphia-induced slumber, and the major-worn out but wakeful-was left alone with his thoughts, the chaotic inchoate thoughts which surge through the mind of any one who, at the end of a strenuous

day crammed with incident, lies unable to sleep from sheer fatigue.

He was of a somewhat refleotive disposition, given at times to speculation on various subjects, more particularly perhaps those of the psychic type rather than the concrete facts of the daily world around him.

To-night, however, it was his brain that was thinking rather than himself; and one salient memory kept insistently surging up before his tired mind-that of a man to whom he had been talking earlier in the day, and who in the very aot of speaking had gone down, shot through the brain.

The only very clear impression, however, that the major retained of the fleeting incident was a certain breathless pause of silence and the other's halfwhispered, half-spoken word as he dropped: "Christ!"

Why this should now come continually into his mind puzzled him. It was quite an ordinary remark of a man suddenly hurt, but somehow it hadn't seemed like that—it had not been said in quite the way one might have sworn if caught on the shin at hockey, for instance.

Also the whole moment had felt peculiar. There had been just that space of time-was it a second, or a fraction of a second, or an age, or what?— when everything had seemed to stand quite still and all was strange as, turning, the major caught that single word, and then saw the other stretched on the ground,

his head in a growing pool of blood.

No; he was vaguely oonsoious of something more behind it something he felt he ought to understand, yet couldn't quite grasp.

What did happen when one died? That of course was a pure speculation, which he had often pondered on in the past, evolving in the process certain ideas of his own, none of which were in the least susceptible to proof, but yet which he felt agreed with his own ideas of the general fitness of the universe as he interpreted it.

When you died you passed on beyond the limitations of time and space, for the major was entirely convinced that you did pass on somewhere: death was to him a transition, not an ending. If, then, you passed out of time your quickness of perception would inorease to an infinite degree, and therefore just on the threshold as it were, all the actions and movements in this limited world would seem immeasurably slow in comparison with the light-like speed of your half-released mind.

Consequently, he argued, if you were just about to die, everything would seem to stand still-just, in fact, the feeling that he had had for an instant that afternoon. On one occasion he himself had been down into the dark gates, and his chief recollection afterwards was one of a feeling of "timelessness"-a strange slowing of everything around him.

But why the passing rustle

of the wings in another's case should to-day produce the same effect on him, even for an instant, was not clear. Doubtless, Death had passed very near, but no nearer than on a soore of other times to-day, and many another day for that matter. No; that explanation hardly sufficed.

Then again, he pondered, what kind of a transition could it be? This point he had never quite clearly settled in his own mind. Was it, for instance, like taking chloroform, a blank gap between the going under on the operating. table and the coming-to in a pleasant fire-lit room?

Or was it perhaps as so many people insisted-a lonely journey through a darkened valley of fear, where the soul

swept suddenly out of its depth-looked helplessly back to see the familiar smiling plains vanish round the turn as the plucking, hurrying waters dragged it forward into the dark tunnel of black dripping rocks, while the call of well-known voices died away, lost in the eerie silence broken only by the wailing of the wind that sweeps down the great divide.

Or was it not rather a more gentle transition, an awakening to the fact of other worlds about you, into which this one was gradually merging at the "Open Sesame" of kindly, grey-eyed, dark-browed Death

laughing sunlit worlds which livened around you, as this one slowed and died to your ever-quickening senses.

Surely that was more likely

to be the real way of it, for there seemed to be no sudden transitions in nature-everything was slow and gradual, never a dividing-line that you could point to-in the merging of winter into spring, in the unfolding of the bud into the flower, in the brightening of the night into the dawn. Why, therefore, should death be an exception, a sudden violent change? Rather would it more probably conform to normal rule, the two states merging together so insensibly that though like light and darkness each was clearly recognisable, yet none could show the demarcation.

His shoulder hurting him, he shifted his position and pulled up his rolled greatcoat under his arm to ease it. Then slowly and laboriously he performed the unaccustomed task of lighting a cigarette one-handed.

Thereafter he fell again to wondering who would meet one at the threshold of the further life. Surely some one very dear, who had orossed the stream a little earlier-wife, sister, friend.

Think of the joy in those last moments as you lay dying, perhaps in agony, with all your world turned dark, unfriendly, hostile even, at seeing some one very dear whom you had not seen for years.

Think of the pain stilled as if by magic at the cool touch of your friend's hand; of the joy of listening to the wellremembered voice and looking into the dear familiar eyes the same still, but luminous

now with brooding knowledge of a hundred worlds, and rich with all the sympathy that knowledge gives.

Surely to pass that way were fitting to a scheme of things meant to be beautiful, as witness the wondrous beauty of this little earth of ours. Because man sits down methodically to make his fellows' life as much like hell as possible with endless horror of war, and ofttimes greater horror of peace, all alike sprung from the senseless desire of unlimited possessions, of place er power, of grabbing something more, it did not follow that other worlds would be the same.

Because half humanity was at heart Mahsud, it did not therefore follow that the whole universe was conceived on Mahsud lines, and that the Creator designed the bulk of His creatures for the sole purpose of pulling off their wings and sticking pins through them to see them wriggle, as some people would have us think.

On the contrary, it seemed more logical to the major to assume that happiness was intended to be the rule, and unhappiness a peculiarly human invention sprung from some flaw in man's character which impels him to torture his fellow whenever the torturing process can be made profitable to himself.

Such Was the major's philosophy, and he felt sure that the chief question one was likely to be asked by one's Creator was as to how much