pleasant, then they came on board again. They shouted now and then in sheer lightness of heart; they were very cheery fellows. We were not towed straight inshore, but to a small natural jetty a hundred and fifty yards west of us along the beach. Here we stepped on British soil, eight thin and weary ragamuffins. We know our hearts gave thanks to God, though our minds could not grasp that we were really free. Our story is nearly at an end, though we have yet to bring our eight travellers to England. Should our already distressed readers hope against hope that the two authors will be torpedoed long before arriving there, we will put an end to any such fond anticipations by telling them truthfully that we were not. In order, however, to soothe in a small way their injured feelings, let us divulge the fact that we, with all but two of the party, spent several days ill in hospital before we reached home. One nearly died from malignant malaria, doubtless caused by the bites of the mosquitoes on the Turkish coast. Having given the reader this sop we will continue. Surrounded by a large but kindly crowd, we sat down on the rocks above the natural jetty on which we had landed, and waited for an answer to Cochrane's note. In the meanwhile a gift arrived from the monastery-a basket containing bread, cheese, olives, and pomegranates. No lark's were tongues, nor the sunny halves of peaches, have ever been so welcome, and we had a wonderful meal, finishing with clean sweet water and cigarettes. About half an hour later an officer, in what looked to us then extraordinarily smart uniform, came down to see why this crowd had colleoted, and on hearing our story conducted us to the village. The road led through orchards whose trees heavy with pomegranates and figs; past vineyards and banana palms, tobacco plants and cotton. Everywhere we could see the signs of a fertile prosperous land, and it struck us forcibly how different it all was from the barren tracts through which we had toiled down to the coast of Asia Minor. No more vivid testimony could be borne to the contrast between British and Turkish sovereignty. The officer with us did not belong to the police, but was on survey work in the island. We were taken, however, to the barracks of the Cyprus Mounted Police, and here, seated on chairs on the verandah, we were given coffee with sugar in it. Everything seemed wonderful. We could smoke as much as we wanted, and the barracks were scrupulously clean and tidy. One by one we went into the garden near a whitewashed well, and were shaved by one of the C.M.P. After a good wash, we brushed our hair for the first time for over five weeks. All that time we had had to be satisfied with a comb. As soon as Lieutenant S of the Police arrived, we were taken upstairs to have breakfast, and right reyally did we feast. The meal ended, we were given the 'Lapethos Echo,' which contained Haig's and Fooh's communiqués of the 9th September. These too were wonderful, and we were greatly amazed by the change which had come over the main battle front since we saw the last paper at Yozgad before we left; then the Germans were, so we were to believe, knocking at the gates of Paris. After breakfast a hot bath and clean clothes were provided for each of us, our rags being collected in a corner with a view to their cremation. A Greek dooter anointed us with disinfectant, and bandaged anything we had in the way of sores or outs. At about 3 P.M. two carriages arrived and our triumphal progress continued. We first paid a final visit to the motor-boat, collecting our few trophies in the way of rifles and flags. This done, we were driven to Kyrenia, a coast town eight or nine miles to the east of us-the police officer and Greek doctor stopping the carriages at every roadside inn to regale us with Turkish delight and iced water. At Kyrenia we were expected by the British residents, who aocommodated us for the night and treated us with the truest British hospitality. Our sensations in finding ourselves once more between sheets in a spring-bed are more easily imagined than described. Late next morning, after a bathe in the sea and when many snapshots of the party had been taken, we were driven off in a motor-lorry, by Captain Gof the A.S.C., to Famagusta, the port of Cyprus on the eastern coast. It was an eighty-mile drive, and what with stopping at Nikosia for lunch and at Larnaka for tea, we did not reach Famagusta and the mess of the Royal Soots, who had kindly offered us a home, till 9 P.M. All the recollections of our four days' stay in Cyprus are of the pleasantest description, as were those also of our voyage to Egypt in two French trawlers. As much cannot be said of the fortnight we spent in Port Said, where we passed the first night sleeping on the sand in a transit camp and most of the rest in hospitalnor of our ten days in a troop train crossing Italy and France. During this time we learntwhat perhaps we needed to be taught that we were after all the least important people in the world. But to tell of these adventures in detail would be to fill another book. Suffice it to say that we were sustained by a few comic episodes: on one occasion, in Italy, we spent five minutes talking Italian, based on slender memories of school-day Latin, to men in another troop train, before we discovered that they were Frenchmen. On another, in France, we remember opening a conversation in French with our engine-driver, who proved to be an American. At length, on the 16th Oot ober 1918, five of our party ings often, in cold and nakedreached England together, ness." preceded by Cochrane, who had managed to arrange for a seat in a "Rapide" across Europe, and followed by the Old Man and Nobby, who had had to remain in hospital in Egypt for another fortnight. Soon after arrival in England, each of us had the very great honour of being individually received by His Majesty the King. His kindly welcome and sympathetic interest in what we had gone through will ever remain a most happy recollection. Finally, we arranged a dinner for all our party, the date fixed being 11th November. This, as it turned out, was Armistice Night, and with that night of happy memories, and a glimpse of the eight companions once again united, we will draw the tale of our adventures to a close. There is one note, however, which we feel we must add before laying down our pens. Many of our readers will have already realised that there was something more than mere luck about our escape. St Paul, alluding to his adventures in almost the very same region as that traversed by us, describes experiences very like our own. Like him, we were "in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, ... in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea; . . . in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fast To be at large for thirty-six days before escaping from the country, to have been so frequently seen, sometimes certainly to have aroused suspicion, and yet to have evaded recapture, might perhaps be attributed to Turkish lack of organisation. Our escape from armed villagers; our discovery of wells in the desert, of grain in an abandoned farmhouse, and of the water (which just lasted out our stay) in the ruined wells on the coast; and finally, the timely reappearance of the motor-tug with all essential supplies for the sea voyage,any one even of these facts, taken alone, might possibly be called "luck," a happy coincidence; taken in conjunotion with one another, however, they compel the admission that the escape of our party was due to a higher Power. It would seem as if it were to emphasise this that on at least three occasions, when everything seemed to be going wrong, in reality all Was working out for our good. Our meeting with and betrayal by the two "shepherds" ought, humanly speaking, to have proved fatal to the sucoess of our venture: we had thrown away valuable food, and were committed to crossing a desert which previously, without a guide, we had looked upon as an impassable obstaole. And yet we know now that it would have been entirely beyond us to have reached the coast by the was made a matter of prayer; and when the final scheme was settled, friends in England were asked, by means of a code message, to intercede for its success. That message, we now know, was received and very fully acted upon. We had also friends in Turkey who were interceding for us; and on the trek it was more than once felt that some one at home or in Turkey was remembering us at the time. To us, then, the hand of Providence was manifest in our escape. We see in it an answer to prayer. Our way, of course, might have been made smoother, but perhaps in that oase route which we had mapped for escape every important step out to Rendezvous X, and that it was only the deflection from our proposed route caused by this rencontre which brought the land journey within our powers of endurance. It was the same when we were forced, against our will, to replenish supplies at a village; the breakdown of one of the party which compelled us to do so undoubtedly saved 18 from making an impossible attempt to reach the coast with the food which remained at the time. Still more remarkable was our failure to take the rowing-boat on the night of 10th/11th September, which resulted in the motor tug falling into our hands and being the final means of our escape on the night following. We feel then that it was a Divine intervention which brought us through. It was in addition an answer to prayer. Throughout the preparations should not we have learnt the same lessons of dependence upon God. As it was, it was made manifest to us that, even in these materialistic days, to those who can have faith, "the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save." OPPORTUNITY. BY DOUGLAS WALSHE. OSMAN's father was a hammal, and he really could carry a piano on his back. That has nothing to do with the story, but I simply can't leave it out. The sight of Osman père staggering with a piano through the streets of Salonica is one of my most vivid memories of the Balkans. He was incredibly bent and filthy-five feet two if straightened out, which he never was, and three feet nine with the piano on his back. His clothes were rags, many - coloured and astonishingly thick. The temperature varied between twenty degrees of frost and ninety odd in the shade, but the costume was always the same. It was only the British who undressed into "shorts "for the heat. Summer and winter, Osman père wore a red cummerbund several yards long, thick baggy underclothes, and thick patched trousers on top, a shapeless upper garment of a carpet-like material, and a fez. So much for Osman's father. I know very little about his mother. Women don't matter in the Balkans. It is safe, however, to assert that whatever else she might be, she was no "moon of delight." Also that she worked much harder than either the hammal or his Osman père would see to son. that. The family residence was situated in the Turkish quarter. 66 There was no bath h. and o., or any other convenience whatsoever. Drawing-room, diningroom, morning-room, and bedrooms were all thrown into one... nine feet by seven. It was, in short, what plainspoken folks would have called a shed, or a British house agent have advertised as self-contained maisonette, convenient of access to the City." You stepped out of the front door-not too boldly, or you might step into the mansion across the way-held your nose as you turned right, and fifty paces brought you to the top of Venizelos Street, the hub of the universe. There was very little furniture in Osman's home. The floor was earth, and the three beds were "made" direct upon it. One was occupied by Osman, one by his sister, and one by his father and mother. Each had a pile of rags for a mattress, and each was oovered with a greasy, ragged eiderdown-for purposes of concealment rather than additional warmth. Under the quilt on number one was a French horsecloth; number two boasted a long Italian cavalry cloak; and number three, the marital couch, sported a British Army blanket. There were no chairs or seats of any description. In the hammal's domicile, one lived as one slept on the floor Everything was on the floor, |