will stand up without any inside assistance from Violet, they are sawn off him and consigned to the incinerator and he is given a new suit.  Whenever his back hair has grown so long that it is liable to impede his movements, a posse of grooms is despatched to his lair to rope, throw and shear him with horse-clippers.  Last time they did it they swear they lost the instrument twice and that two bats and an owl flew out of his tresses.

He is allowed out only at night, because the German prisoners laugh at him, which is bad for his moral and good for theirs.  He lives, he and his cat, deep in the chateau woods in a tiny semi-subterranean cabin he has constructed of odds and ends of tin and tar-paper.  He was supposed to have been demobilised ages ago, but we cannot get him off the premises.

Bob goes and interviews him on the subject about three times a day—­all to no avail. “‘Tain’t a bit o’ use you comin’ an’ flappin’ them there paperses at me, Mister” (all officers, irrespective of rank, are “Mister” to Violet), says he to Bob; “you know very well I aren’t no scholard an’ I won’t sign nothin’ I can’t read, even if I could sign, which I can’t, bein’ no scholard; so there’s the end of it, as I’ve told you scores of times before, with all due respect, of course, as the sayin’ is.”

He doesn’t want to go home and he won’t go home, he says.  His wife beats him “somethink crool,” he says; in fact he never knew what real peace meant until war broke out.  Furthermore she has been putting on a lot of muscle of late and demobilisation means certain death.  He is going to stay where he is.  What with the ginger cat’s poaching proclivities and the bully beef he has buried in the plantation he can hold out almost indefinitely, he says; so there is no cause for us to be anxious on his behalf.  When we come back for the next war we shall find him on the old stand, ready to resume business, he says, and for his part the next war can’t break out any too soon.

The remainder of Bob’s time, as I said before, is occupied in trying to square his establishment returns.  Some time ago he discovered that he was a water-cart short.  This was serious, very.  A water-cart is a large and expensive item, and as far as he could see it would end in his having to make good the loss out of his own pocket, which at that moment contained ten centimes and a corkscrew.

However he was determined he would see what a little applied cunning would do first.  He locked himself into his office and took thought.  After an hour’s violent mental disturbance he penned a letter to the authorities, saying that his establishment was complete in all details, with the exception of one water-bottle.  As, however, he had come by several superfluous knives, spoons and forks considerably exceeding the water-bottle in value, might they be taken in exchange and the account squared?  The Government would be greatly the gainer thereby.