The child stopped crying at once, and Delane, raising her on to his shoulder, pulling his own soft hat over his eyes and placing the child so that her dress concealed his own features. Then he resumed an excited scrutiny of the Great End wagon. At the same moment he saw a man in uniform making his way through the crowd towards Miss Henderson who was waving to him. An officer--an American officer. Delane recognized at once the high collar and the leathern peak to the cap. The crowd had already begun to cheer him. He reached the Great End wagon, and its mistress, all smiles, bent over to speak to him. She and the vicar seemed to be giving directions, to which the American with a laughing shrug assented, going off to the front wagon, evidently in obedience to orders. There the girl speaker had just sat down amid a hearty cheer from the crowd; and the chairman of the meeting, a burly farmer, eagerly came to the side of the wagon, and helped the American officer into the cart. Then with a stentorian voice the chairman announced that Captain Ellesborough from Ralstone camp had come "to tell us what America is doing!" A roar from the crowd. Ellesborough saluted gaily, and then his hands in his pockets began to talk to them. His speech, which was a racy summary of all that America was doing to help the Allies, was delivered to a ringing accompaniment of cheers from the thronged market-place, rising to special thunder when the captain dwelt on the wheat and bacon that America was pouring across the Atlantic to feed a hungry Europe. "We've tightened our own belts already; we can tighten them, I dare say, a few holes more. Everybody in America's growing something, and making something. When a man thinks he's done enough, and wants to rest a bit, the man next him gets behind him with a bradawl. There's no rest for anybody. We've just registered _thirteen million_ men. That sounds like business, doesn't it? No slacking there! Well, we mean business. And you mean business. And the women mean business." Then a passage about the women, which set the land girls grinning at each other, and at the men in the crowd, ending in three cheers for Marshal Foch and Sir Douglas Haig, which came echoing back from the Fourteenth Century church and the old houses which ringed the market-place.