making for a bit of crumbled bank opposite, and Tommy stood up for better aim. The poet held his breath.

One foot more and the prey would be lost, but Tommy stood like a young statue—then whang; and slowly the rat turned over on his back and vanished from sight, to float presently—a swollen corpse—down the quiet stream.

"Well hit, sir," cried the poet.

Tommy turned with dancing eyes.

"Jolly nearly lost him," he said. "You should just see young Collins with a catty. He's miles better than me."

But the poet had remembered himself.

"Tommy," he said, huskily, "I—I don't approve of sport of this kind. Cannot you aim at—at inanimate objects?"

"It's a jolly poor game," said Tommy—then holding out the wooden fork, with its pendant elastic.

"Have a try," he said.

The poet accepted a handful of ammunition.

"I must amuse the boy and enter into his sports as far as I may if I would influence his character," he said to himself.

Tommy stuck a clod of earth on a stick some few yards away, at which, for some time, the poet shot wildly enough.

Yet, with each successive attempt, the desire for success grew stronger within him, and when at last the clod flew into a thousand crumbs, he flushed with triumph, and had to wipe the dimness from his glasses.

Oh, poets! it is dangerous to play with fire.

Plop.

And another lusty rat held bravely out into the stream.

"Oh, get him, get him!" cried Tommy, jumping up and down. "Lend me the catty. Let me have a shot. Do buck up."

But the poet waved him aside.

"There shall be no—" he hesitated.

This rat was surely uglier than the last.

"No unseemly haste," concluded the poet.

Did the rat scent danger? I know not, but, on a sudden, he turned back to shelter. And, alas, this was too much for even Principle and Conscience—and whang went the catapult, and lo, even as by a miracle (which, indeed, it surely was), the bullet found its mark.

And I regret to say that the vicar, leaning unnoticed on a neighbouring gate, heard the poet exclaim, with some exultation: "Got him."

"Oh, well hit!" cried Tommy. "By Jove, that was a ripping shot."

The poet blushed at the praise—but alas for human pleasures, and notably stolen ones, for they are fleeting.

"Hullo," said a sonorous voice.

They both turned, and the vicar smiled.

The poet was hatless and flushed. From one hand dangled a catapult; in the other he clutched some convenient pebbles.

"Really," said the vicar, "I should never have thought it."

The poet sighed, and handed the weapon to Tommy.

"Run away now, old chap," he said, "and have a good time. I think I shall go home."

Tommy trotted off into the wood, and the vicar and the poet held back towards the village.

"How goes the experiment?" asked the former, magnanimously ignoring the scene he had just witnessed.

The poet shook his head.

"It is hard to say yet," he replied. "I have not seen any marked development of the poetical and imaginative side of him—and he brings some very queer friends to my house. But he's a good boy, on the whole, and the holidays have only just begun."

In the village street they paused.

"I—I want to go to the post-office," said the poet.

"All right," said the vicar.

"Don't—please don't wait for me," said the poet.

"It's a pleasure," replied the vicar. "The day is fine and young, and it is also Monday. I am not busy."

"I really wish you wouldn't."

The vicar was a man of tact, and had known the poet since boyhood, so he bowed.

"Good day," he said, and strolled towards the parsonage.

The poet looked up and down the long, lazy street. There was no one in sight. Then he plunged into the little shop.

"Some elastic, please," he said, nervously. "Thick and square—for a catapult."

III

IN WHICH A HAT FLOATS DOWN STREAM

"And so my boy has taken up his abode with our friend, the poet," wrote the colonel to me. "Do you know, I fancy it will be good for both of them. I have long felt that our poet was getting too solitary and remote—too self-centred, shall I say?

"And yet I have, too, some misgivings as to his power of controlling Tommy—although my faith in Mrs. Chundle is profound.

"Tommy, as you know, is not perhaps quite so strong as he might be, and needs careful watching—changing clothes and so on. You recollect his sudden and quite severe illness just after the Chantrey's garden party last year."

I laid down the letter and smiled, for I had wondered at the time at Tommy's survival, so appalling had been his powers of absorption.

"Poor colonel," I reflected. "He is too ridiculously wrapped up in the young rascal, for anything."

The letter ran on:

"Spare no expense as to his keep and the supplying of his reasonable wishes, but do not let him know, at any rate for the present, that he is heir to Camslove—I think he does not realise it yet—and for a while it is better he should not.

"My greeting to all the brothers. There are wars and rumours of wars in the air of the Northwest...."

I restored the letter to my pocket, and lay back in the grass, beneath the branches.

Wars and rumours of wars—well, they were far enough from here, as every twittering birdling manifested.

The colonel had always been the man of action among us, though he, of us all, had the wherewithal to be the most at ease.

One of those strange incongruities with which life abounds, and which, I reflected, must be accepted with resignation.

I had always rather prided myself upon the completeness with which I had resigned myself to my lot of idleness and obscurity, and to my own mind was a philosopher of no small merit.

I lay back under the trees full of the content of the day and the green woods and abandoned myself to meditation.

Whether it was the spirit of Spring or some latent essence of activity in my being, I do not know, but certain it is that a wave of discontent spread over me—a weariness (very unfamiliar) of myself and my cheap philosophy.

I sat up, wondering at the change and its suddenness, groping in my mind for a solution to the problem.

Could it be that my rule of life was based on a fallacy?

Surely not. Suddenly I thought of Tommy and took a deep breath of the sweet woodland air, for I had found what I had wanted.

Resignation—it was a sacrilege to use the word on such a day.

Yes, I thought, there is no doubt that the instinctive philosophy of boyhood is the true rule of life, as indeed one ought to have suspected long ago.

To enjoy the present with all the capacity of every sense, to regard the past with comparative indifference, since it is irrevocable, and the future with a healthy abandonment, since it is unknown, and to leave the sorrows of introspection to those who know no better—avaunt with your resignation. And even as I said it I saw the reeds by the pool quiver and a pair of brown eyes twinkle joyously at me from their midst.

"Hello, Tommy!" I cried.

He emerged, clad only in an inconspicuous triangular garment about his waist.

"I've been watching you ever so long," he said triumphantly.

"Been bathing?" I asked.

"Rather. It's jolly