There spoke the old fighter, “Duty first, and take your chance of the rest.”  True; but could not one almost wish that those forlorn heroes who saved our frontier from savage hordes might have gained just a little of that praise so dear to the frivolous mind of man?  It was not to be; the dead men’s bones have long ago sunk into the kindly earth, the wind flows down the valleys, and the fighters sleep in the unknown glens and on far-distant hillsides with no record save the curt clerk’s mark in the regimental list—­“Dead.”

When I hear the merry pressman chatting about little wars and proudly looking down on “mere skirmishes,” I cannot restrain a movement of impatience.  Are our few dead not to be considered because they were few?  Supposing they had swarmed forward in some great battle of the West and died with thousands of others amid the hurricane music of hundreds of guns, would the magnitude of the battle make any difference?

Honour to those who risk life and limb for England; honour to them, whether they die amid loud battle or in the far-away dimness of a little war!

September, 1888.

THE BRITISH FESTIVAL.

Again and again I have talked about the delights of leisure, and I always advise worn worldlings to renew their youth and gain fresh ideas amid the blessed calm of the fields and the trees.  But I lately watched an immense procession of holiday-makers travelling mile after mile in long-drawn sequence—­and the study caused me to have many thoughts.  There was no mistake about the intentions of the vast mob.  They started with a steadfast resolution to be jolly—­and they kept to their resolution so long as they were coherent of mind.  It was a strange sight—­a population probably equal to half that of Scotland all plunged into a sort of delirium and nearly all forgetting the serious side of life.  As I gazed on the frantic assembly, I wondered how the English ever came to be considered a grave solid nation; I wondered, moreover, how a great percentage of men representing a nation of conquerors, explorers, administrators, inventors, should on a sudden decide to go mad for a day.  Perhaps, after all, the catchword “Merry England” meant really “Mad England”; perhaps the good days which men mourned for after the grim shade of Puritanism came over the country were neither more nor less than periods of wild orgies; perhaps we have reason to be thankful that the national carnivals do not now occur very often.  Our ancestors had a very peculiar idea of what constituted a merry-making, and there are many things in ancient art and literature which tempt us to fancy that a certain crudity distinguished the festivals of ancient days; but still the latter-day frolic in all its monstrous proportions is not to be studied by a philosophic observer without profoundly moving thoughts arising.  As I gazed on the endless flow of travellers, I could hardly help wondering how the mob would conduct themselves during any great