IN A HAMPSHIRE VILLAGE i6i 



and I asked him how, with such a feehng as he had 

 revealed about his native phice, he had been able to 

 spend his life away from it, and why he did not go back 

 there now? That, he answered, was his desire and 

 intention, not only since he had begun to grow old, but 

 he had cherished the idea even when he was a young 

 man and in his prime, in India, Burma, Afghanistan, 

 Egypt. Now at last the time seemed near when his 

 desire would be fulfilled ; two years more in the park and 

 he would retire with a small pension, which, added to 

 his soldier's pension, would enable him to pass the 

 remnant of his life in his native village. 



I thought of him now, the tall straight old soldier, 

 with his fine stern face and grey moustache and hair, 

 who had spend his years in defending the Empire in 

 many distant lands, and was now anxiously guarding 

 a blackbird's nest in a park from the wild, lawless little 

 Afghans and Soudanese of the London slums. It was 

 nice to think of him here where he would soon be back 

 in his boyhood haunts, as I sat on the trunk of a sloping 

 tree by the stream, a stone's throw from the churchyard. 

 I was practically in the village, yet not a sound could 

 be heard but the faint whisper of the wind in the trees 

 near me and the ripple and gurgling of the water at my 

 feet. Then came another sound — the sudden loud sharp 

 note of alarm or challenge of a moorhen a few yards 

 away. There she stood on the edge of the clear water, 

 in a green flowery bed of watermint and forget-me-not, 

 with a thicket of tall grasses and comfrcy behind her, 

 the shapely black head with its brilliant orange and 



