“I’m sure I can’t tell ’ee,” answered Nicky-Nan after a painful effort at guessing.  “It couldn’ be for obscene language; nor yet for drunks.”

Policeman Rat-it-all leant forward and touched him on the top button of his waistcoat.

“Zepp-a-lins!” he said mysteriously.

“Eh?”

“Zepp-a-lins!”

“Oh!”—­Nicky-Nan’s brow cleared—­“You mean them German balloon things the papers make so much fuss about.”

“Die-rigitable,” added Rat-it-all.  “That’s the point.”

“Well? . . .  Have ’ee seen any?” Nicky-Nan lifted his gaze skyward.

“I won’t go so far as to say that I’ve seen anything answerin’ to that description knockin’ about—­not up to the present.  But these are times when a man must keep his eyes liftin’ if he doesn’ want Old England to be taken with what the newspapers call a Bolt from the Blue.”

“I’ve come across the expression,” said Nicky-Nan.

“Well, what I say is, Down here, in this corner of the world—­though, mind you, I’m not sayin’ anything against it—­you don’t reelise things:  you reely don’t.  Now I come from Bodmin, as I think I must have told you.”

“You did.”

“Where you see the soldiers goin’ about with the stripes down their trowsers:  but they’ve done away with that except for the Yeomanry (which is black, or dark blue, I forget which), and that’s how you know the difference.  So your mind gets enlarged almost without your knowin’ it, and you feel what’s at stake.”

“I wonder you didn’ want to enlist,” said Nicky-Nan.

“I did:  but I was too tall—­too tall and too strong,” sighed the policeman, bending his arm and causing his biceps to swell up mountainously.  “You haven’t a notion how strong I am—­if, for instance, I took it into my head to catch you up and heave you over the Quay here.  Yes, yes, I am wonderfully well made!  And on top of that, Mother picked up some nonsense against soldiering off a speaker at a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon.  There was nothing for it but the Force.  So here I AM.  But give me the wings of a dove, and I’d join the Royal Flyin’ Corps to-morrow, where they get higher pay because of the risk, same as with the submarines.  If you ask me, every Englishman’s post at this moment is in the firing line.”

Nicky-Nan winced, and changed the subject in haste.

“Well, it must be a great consolation to have such strength as yours,” he said pleasantly.  “But I wonder—­with nothing else doin’, and on a Bank Holiday too—­you could manage to stay away from the School Treat.”

“Rat it all!” broke out the constable, and checked himself.  “I thought I was igsplaining to you,” he went on as one who reasons patiently with an infant, “that a man has to think of something above an’ beyond self in these days.”

“I never found time to think out the rights an’ wrongs o’ warfare, for my part,” said Nicky-Nan.