That upper zig-zag was clear now; but below in the fog lay another, and another, and another, where the fugitives might be caught. So the battalion charged again and again, while Tompkins coming down quite easily, "a all-fours," fired volleys steadily. The jest and the earnest of it, what pen can tell? Till through the fog rang a faint hurrah. The last of the zig-zags had blindly been reached, and neither far nor near upon the hillside down which the battalion had charged in open order, was foe--not to be seen, but felt! The uttermost void was void indeed. "We've got no dooleys, men," said Dr. Tiernay, wiping his forehead once more, "so the wounded must crawl back to hospital as best they can." So they crawled. All but Tompkins; the doctor insisted upon carrying him pick-a-back, on the ground that he, the doctor, was the only whole man in the battalion, and was bound to do double work. And the next morning, when he went his rounds, he stood for a minute or two beside a fretful baby, and then took out his lancet. "It's against me principles, me dear madam," he said, with a shrug of his shoulders; "for there's a toime for everything, and everything in its toime; and no one, not even a tooth, knows what it would be at till that toime comes. But as I said the throuble would be over, and the rest of it is;--why, I'll keep my word!" And it was over; for a message saying he was close on the heels of his messenger came from the general in command of relief. The fog had lifted by this time, lifted for steady rain; so the English troops coming up found the foes more easily than the battalion had done. But the foes were dead. Those random shots, those reckless charges from nothingness to nothingness had done some work. And part of it was on the naked body of a Jain ascetic, with a bit of muslin swathed about his mouth, lest, inadvertently, he should bring death to the smallest of God's creatures. GOLD, FRANKINCENSE, AND MYRRH "Oh! Mummy," said the Boy, as his mother slipped a sort of nightgown over his trim little khaki uniform, "I think it'sh shkittles!" Boy's invariable dissent--picked up about the barracks of an Indian cantonment--was applied in this instance both to the angelic robe represented by the nightgown, and the angelic part the child was to play in it. For it was Christmas Eve, and the vague desire for peace and goodwill which, even in these latter days, comes with Christmas-tide, had made the English aliens in the station devise a Tree for those still greater aliens--the Boer prisoners--who lived among them in the strange spider's web of barbed wire, which to the casual eye seemed so inefficient a prison for enemies who had defied capture so long, so bravely.