Other things besides the war have happened in those four years. Daddy did not settle down in Devonshire, but his passion for men’s souls has driven him to one of the terrible places of the earth, where he lives among natives, for whom he has always had a kind of abhorrence. He and Porky wage war against the devil over an immense tract of country, for daddy is on the Bench now, and his diocese is next to that of the Bishop of Ligeria. They meet once a year, daddy and his old fag, both consumed with a burning desire that men’s bodies should be clean and their souls washed white, both so muscular and so militant that they are utterly unable to comprehend ’the church passive,’ or to see why a man can’t shoot and ride and crack a joke as well as pray. But then, as Ross used to say, ’Father is a man first and a parson afterwards.’ I have sometimes wondered, since I have learned to see things ’farther than my nose,’ whether the sentiment expressed so elegantly by my brother did not contain an element of truth, _i.e._ ’that the chaps in the pews are more likely to listen to what the chap in the pulpit is jawing about if they know he’s a good shot and rides as straight as they do.’ But the thrill of the years was Cousin Emily, who, without a word to any one, let her house in Hampstead and turned up one day at daddy’s bungalow and announced that she had come to keep house for him and to instil kindness to animals among the natives. My father (with that mediæval humour that made people in the Middle Ages put up gargoyles on their churches) says ’Emily’s parrot, Meg, has done more for the cause than any missionary ever born will do. The natives simply love the collect for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity!’ At one of the annual meetings Porky asked Emily if he could borrow the godly bird for _his_ diocese, but there was that in his eyes which made her know he wanted her as well. So daddy married them, and they are now like the parrot, ’continually given to all good works together! The paralytic chaplain’s health has given out. The strain of one of the annual meetings (or else the climate) was too much for him, so he has been sent home, and has a curacy in England and a wife now, who can lay those ’snow-white flowers’ against his hair! And talking of England reminds me that while Michael wrestled with his packing in a kind of sulphurous haze, I pulled strings. If you pull them hard enough in India you can generally make the puppets work, so somehow I got a passage and embarked for England three days after Michael sailed for France. Captain Everard, a great friend of my brother, sailed in the same boat. He was so kind when I felt sick and kept my small daughter amused.