brother fell back not merely an' he powerless-with them upon the right of possession leppin' divils of Turks firing but upon the olaimant's on him! Could I lave him to apostasy in fighting for the Enemy of his country- an accusation which Flynn denied, with many oaths. "Give me me rights, give me me mother's feather-bed," was his daily iteration. "I'll not," was the diurnal reply: "let ye go now and get a feather-bed from the English Gover-mint. 'Tis the lovely one they ought to give ye for fightin' the Germans for them." "Ah, don't be botherin' me. Ye know well enough I never fought the Germans, nor wouldn't, for no one." "Augh! An' who did ye fight?" "I've told ye till I'm sick and tired of tellin' ye. I fought the Turks, haythen Tarks; 'faith ye'd fight them yerself if ye seen them comin' at ye in black haythen hordes, so ye would, for all yer so careful of yer ould yalla skin." “Ah, ye may say what ye like, ye have a dirty ould English medal in yer pocket!" "I have not; that's a lie anyhow. There's no medal in me pocket." There was not. It was in the pawnshop. "I don't care where it is: ye had it, and ye got it, and ye can't deny ye got it; an' what did ye get it for if it it for if it wasn't for "Ah, shut yer mouth; sure don't ye know very well 'twasn't my fault, I couldn't help gettin' it. Could I go and lave poor Tim Dooley be kilt dead, and poor Mary his wife and their innocent child eryin' their eyes out for him, and them never to see a sight of him again! Sure that was the whole of it all. Would ye have me run away and lave the poor good quiet Irishman to be conshumed entirely by them-them- black cannibals?" "Ab, ye may talk, but ye took their ould medal, say what ye like." "I took it! Glory be to God, and d'ye know anything in the earthly worrld about th' Army! Took it! Bedad, when ye get in there they don't ask ye if ye'll take anything, they give ye what they like, and that's all about it. Give me me mother's feather-bed, and hould yer whisht, and stop gabbin' of what ye know nothin' about." "Ye may go whistle for it, I'm tellin' ye." Thus it went on day in day out, until the day when Flynn ate his brother's dinner. The dinner in question happened to be a particularly good one, and had been specially prepared for the brother on his return from a long job some distance away. He was late, and Flynn, coming in, proceeded to wolf every bit of it alone. it alone. The last savoury mouthful was even yet in his throat when he for whom it had been destined arrived, and caught Flynn flagrante delicto. Thereupon, as the newspapers would express it, a scene of violence ensued. Tired, hungry, and incensed, Flynn's brother ordered the culprit out of the house once and for all, and would listen to neither excuse nor apology. "If ye put me out," said Flynn at last, with all the solemnity of utterance befitting a resolution so awful, "I'll lay a CURSE on ye!" But the brother was proof even against this. "I'll chance the Curse," he retorted grimly: "out ye pop." And out Flynn popped. The eviction was accompanied by the usual dramatie accessories. For not only was Flynn thrown out, but his personal belongings were thrown after him in the approved method of feroible ejectment. Each article was the subject of insult as it was flung into the street. Finally, a pair of khaki "slacks" went hurtling through the air, and with them opprobrium reached its olimax. "Go on now," roared Flynn's brother, much to the joy of a hasty assemblage of onlookers, "and take yer blasted English uniform to hell along with ye. I'll not have it pollutin' me honest house any longer." And having thus acoomplished the purgation, he slammed and bolted the door of the honest house aforesaid, to a murmur from the public, wherein sympathy for the greater part, but some disagreement also, were distinctly mingled. Flynn slept that night in a neighbour's barn with the khaki slacks for a pillow. The following day, as it happened, was that upon which the instalment of a grateful country's pension became due to him. Having drawn it, he forthwith proceeded, as might be expected, to drown care in the golden bowl of John Jameson. The immersion, however, did not cause him to forget his grievance, nor the string of his tougue to be straitened. On the contrary, the noise of his argumentation rent the air, while he ceased not day or night to revile those who, he believed and declared, had entered into a nefarious conspiracy to defraud him. Among the latter his whisky fed imagination ineluded the parish priest. That blameless personage had indeed areused Flynn's worst suspicions by declining to throw the weight of his influence either to one side or the other. Inflamed by ardent spirits and rankling suspicion, Flynn føllowed the unfortunate cleric whenever he caught sight of him, and lifting up his voice beyond the bounds of decorum, gave utterance to disrepect so gross as to warrant the terse description of his state given by the village as that of"terrible mad." Although the object of these attentions wisely forbore to notice them, it became almost a daily occurrenee to see Flynn pursuing his pastor, shouting meanwhile at the top of his voice: "Give me back me mother's feather-bed, ye ould bag of feathers. D'ye hear what I'm sayin' to ye? Ah, ye ould hypo-oret, ye ould bag of feathers! How dare ye favour. Taking into consideration his previous character-in reality his war service, but the magistrates were too prudent to say this openly-they discharged him with a caution. He left the court accordingly a free man, exchanging smiling greetings with those sympathisers who hailed his release with invitations to (liquid) refreshment. These he declined with an inflexibility which would have done justice to a Pussyfoot candidate for a Prohibition Parliament. The Law, however, at length overtook Flynn with its proverbially long arm. Ninetysix hours in a place of detention restored him to sobriety and a sense of his situation. He was brought forth unresistingly and placed before the judgment-seat-in other words, the court of petty sessions presided over by a benevolent bevy of justices of the peace. Here, in due order, his oase was called, and the enormity of his offence gravely detailed. Flynn, now calm, confronted the "Binoh" with a deferential and even obsequious air. There was not one of its occupants for whom he had not worked at some time or other and in varied capacity. They, for their part, knew him quite as well as he knew them. In the end, asked by the chairman what he had to say for himself, and why he had insulted his clergyman and broken the peace in a manner so disgraceful and unwarrantable, he replied with ingratiating candour "Yer honour's worship, 'tis an exthror-nary thing, but the fact of the matter is, that somehow or other, whenever I do have a drop of drink in me, it always turns to clerical abuse." The face of the "Bench" remained unmoved and composedly stern, nevertheless for the fraction of a second a ripple of light seemed to irradiate it with passing humour. The decision went in Flynn's Thenceforward our Flynn seemed lost to us. Rumour as to his whereabouts varied; one report asserted he had fled his native village, declaring that only in so doing could he avoid having his broken heart still further lacerated by the daily sight of those "that was robbin' him an' his mother, and she in her grave." Another gave out that he had re-enlisted, but this gained scanty credence. A little later the following appeared in a London daily paper: NEW REIGN OF TERROR IN IRELAND. "A mysterious description of outrage has just made its appearance in remote parts of the country. It takes the form of kidnapping. A respectable carpenter named Flynn was torn out of his bed a night or two ago by a party of masked and armed men, and having been bound and gagged, was carried to a wood and there deposited, quite naked, save for his night-shirt. The unfortunate man, who, so far as is known, had no personal enemies in the district, must inevitably have perished of cold and exposure, but that by some extraordinary stroke of good-fortune his brother happened to be passing through the wood at the time and came upon the miscreants and their victim before the former were able to decamp. With great intrepidity this man-who, we understand, is an ex-soldier and fought with much gallantry in the late war, in which he was severely wounded, winning the D.C.M.-attacked his brother's assailants and actually beat them off. He then lost no time in summoning the police, and with their aid conveyed his brother back to his home, where he lies suffering from shock. The ocourrence has caused considerable excitement in the district. It is conjectured that the fact that Flynn had his soldier brother living with him recently, incurred for him the enmity of the local branch of Sinn Fein, which is very strong in this part of the country; or it may have been one of the usual raids in search of arms, as the raiders-whe, however, could find no weapons of any sort left the house in much disorder. Some artioles of furniture have been broken or damaged, and some are missing, notably a large featherbed. . . . Interviewed by our representative to - day, the resouer, who is the D.C.M. hero already mentioned, was modestly reticent about his own prowess, though there is no doubt whatever that his brother owes his life to his brave intervention. As usual, ne arrests have been made....' VOL. CCVIII.-NO. MCCLVII. E THE DREAMERS. "If you can dream and not make dreams your master, If you can think, yet not make thought your aim." I. THE SUBALTERN. "A SORT of glorified jump, Manning, that's really all it is." The speaker, a tall, thin, soldierly-looking man, with sparse grey hair and keen blue eyes, fumbled in his pocket for a match to relight the oheroot which he had carelessly allowed to go out in the heat of the discussion. An eminently practical man, typical of his years and service, Colonel Smythe had little use or sympathy for dreamers, as he stigmatised people like the subaltern opposite to him, who, sprawling at full length in the ruined arohway, was watching the evolutions of a pair of white vultures below them, drifting steadily backward and forward, level with the battle ments. They had driven out from Delhi to look over the old ruins to the south, and the evening found them ensconced in a corner of the walls of Purana Qila, as Humayon's Fort at Indrapat is called locally, while Patricia Smythe manœuvred with the tea-basket. "But, sir, the gliders have been held in the air for over twenty seconds." "Only owing to the momentum they started with. It's just like a rifle bullet. If you give enough way to any pro -KIPLING, jectile it will keep up a certain distance in the air. But that's got no relation to bird's flight at all." "But surely it's the same thing: a plane launched into the air, and gliding through it just like a bird. If only one could keep up the momentum by some means, one could go on indefinitely like the bird does." "Yes, but you can't, and never will be able to. Man wasn't meant to fly, or he'd have been made differently." "I don't agree, sir: I think he was meant to do everything -in time; the question is, how near we've got to the time for flying. Personally, I think we're just on it." He stopped thoughtfully. "And when we de stumble on it, it's going to revolutionise things a bit." "Pass me the teapot, please, Mr Manning: the kettle's just boiling." The girl's clear voice breke in on the discussion, and Manning, sitting up, pulled the teabasket towards him. "Here you are, Miss Smythe; I'm sorry for not assisting, I was so busy arguing." "Oh, you'll never convince Dad. I've tried, and it's no go. He's certain men weren't made for flight, and so that settles it for good and all. |