When and how he acquired the wherewithal to wreck the high hopes of the reigning stage manager was a mystery known to him alone. His messmates drained their tots at dinner with conscientious thoroughness, and his into the bargain, striving together less in the cause of temperance than from a desire that he should for once do himself and his concertina (of which he was a master) justice. Yet, his turn announced, on the last occasion of a concert before the war, the curtain rose upon an empty stage. The Carpenter's party happened upon him, as archaeologists might excavate a Sleeping Bacchus or a recumbent Budda, in the process of dismantling the stage. Private Mason was underneath it, breathing stertorously, a smile of beatific contentment on his worn features, his head pillowed on his concertina. The Fleet Surgeon subsequently missed a large-sized bottle of eau-de-Cologne from his cabin, which he was bringing home from Gibraltar as a present for his wife. The discovery of the loss assisted him in his diagnosis of the case. Silence fell on the audience at length, and the concertina solo began. As has been indicated, Private Mason could play the concertina. In his rather tremulous hands it was no longer an affair of leather and wood (or of whatever material concertinas are constructed), but a living thing that laughed and sobbed, and shook your soul like the Keening. It became a yearning, passionate, exultant daughter of Music that somehow wasn't quite respectable. And when he had finished, and passed his hand across his moist forehead preparatory to retiring from the stage, they shouted for more. "Church bells, Nobby!" cried a hundred voices. "Garn, do the church bells!" So he did the church bells, as the wind brings the sound across the valley on a summer evening at home, wringing his shipmates' sentimental heartstrings to the limit of their enjoyment. "Strewth!" ejaculated a bearded member of the audience when the turn was over, relighting his pipe with a hand that shook. "I 'ear Nobby play that at the Canteen at Malta, time Comman'er-in-Chief an' 'is Staff was there--Comman'er-in-Chief, so 'elp me, 'e sob' like a woman. . . ." The reminiscence may not have been in strict accordance with the truth, but, even considered in the light of fiction, it was a pretty testimony to Private Mason's art.