CHAPTER X MY PARTIAL ESCAPE FROM THE MUDTHE DESERTED VILLAGEMY "COTTAGE" Our next time up after our Christmas Day experiences were full of incident and adventure.

In this cottage at St. Yvon the craving came back to me.

"I'll have a look at that old cottage up on the right to-night," I used to say to myself, and later, when the time came for me to walk back from the trenches, I would go off at a new angle across the plain, and make for my objective.

Straggling, small groups of Belgian civilians were now passing down the lane, driven out no doubt from some cottage or other that until now they had managed to persist in living in.

I went down the field to the cottage at the corner, and, entering, found all the company commanders, the second in command, the Adjutant and the Colonel.

Instead of the meanness, distress, complaint, anxiety, and dependance, which have hitherto been combined in his ideas of poverty, he will read of content, innocence, and cheerfulness, of health and safety, tranquillity and freedom; of pleasures not known but to men unencumbered with possessions; and of sleep that sheds his balsamick anodynes only on the cottage.

In a village in England were two little motherless girls who lived in a small cottage.

And now, while this was going on inside of that little cottage, let me tell you what was taking place outside.

Not far from this cottage lived an old man who was a miser.

Now, it happened, that just as he was passing the cottage in which the little girls were, a strong blast of wind blew the rain in his face, and he stepped into the porch of the cottage and crouched down in the corner, to shelter himself from the wind and rain.

Now, it happened, that just as he was passing the cottage in which the little girls were, a strong blast of wind blew the rain in his face, and he stepped into the porch of the cottage and crouched down in the corner, to shelter himself from the wind and rain.

But before he died, as he was the owner of the cottage in which the little girls lived, he gave it to their father.

You know, I promised you An airing o'er the pleasant Hampshire downs To the blest cottage on the green hill side, Where first I told my love.

From the state Of gilded roofs, attendance, luxuries, Parks, gardens, sauntering walks, or wholesome rides, To the bare cottage on the withering moor, Where I myself am servant to myself, Or only waited on by blackest thoughts I sink, if this be so.

But for that other SELBY He dismiss'd him straight, From dreams of grandeur and of Caliph's love, To the bare cottage on the withering moor, Where friends, turn'd fiends, and hollow confidants, And widows, hide, who, in a husband's ear, Pour baneful truths, but tell not all the truth; And told him not that Robert Halford died Some moons before his marriage-bells were rung.

Here at least in the cottage I will never come again.

"Well, I went into her cottage and I said.

Often in a little while both the château and the cottage were buried in the same heap of ruins.

As long as three months before Crouy itself had been a target for the enemy's guns, so that hardly a cottage was standing with solid walls.

We came to a halt again at the place where the soldiers were crouched under the cottage walls.

We drove back along the road towards Dixmude, and rescued another wounded man left in a wayside cottage.

One man was holding his head to keep his brains from spilling, and the others lay tangled amidst upturned chairs and cottage furniture.

There was the photograph of a family group on the mantelpiece, between cheap vases which had been the pride, perhaps, of this cottage home.

SCENE II Interior of TELL's cottage.

The cottage round the corner SEE Kidder, Mrs. M. A. TUCKER, J. OLIVER.