God's acre, bare and barren woods, Cross-guarded mounds where noon-rays burn-- Like pale knights praying by their swords, Set upright in the bracken-fern-- Thy love shall keep our freemen free, Gallipoli, Gallipoli! J. ALEX. ALLEN in the _Sydney Bulletin_. V ROMANCE AND REALITY. The Army Chaplain, drawn by Mars from his quiet round of parish work and life, made up, as it is, of pastoral visitation, educational and devotional meetings, and the public services of the Sabbath, is certain to find active service a restless experience. His battles aforetime, fierce enough sometimes, were in the arena of Synod or Conference Hall, and his duels were of the more or less friendly sort of the Ministers' Fraternal. Now he sees something of battles more dramatic, in which the missiles are more than words. He moves in an atmosphere of romance mingled with grim reality, and he begins to feel that he is living in heroic days. He sees the world in process of reconstruction, and looks on whilst the fabric of man's life and character is taken down and built up again according to a new pattern. Our disappointment in not being allowed to proceed straight to the front in France was somewhat mitigated by the news that we were to train and wait beneath the shadows of the mighty Pyramids at Cairo. On the ground where Napoleon, addressing his troops, reminded them that 'forty centuries looked down upon them' and awaited their achievements, we trekked through the sand, sweated through the hot days and shivered during the cold nights, as we camped amid sand which is always either very hot or cold. There was a hard winter's work for padres here who desired to do something to counteract the evil attractions of Cairo for the troops. The reality was, however, always tinctured with the romantic glamour of Egypt and the Nile. There was Vieux Cairo—the ancient Forstad—with its undoubted earliest Christian Church; the place to which we can say with almost certainty that Joseph and Mary came with the Infant Christ. Wanderings amid the antiquities of this ancient place full of Coptic traditions, and an occasional mingling with the multi-coloured crowds gathering among the Bazaars of the Monsky, somewhat relieved the tedium of evolutions amid the eternal sand of the Libyan Desert. A hard three days' manœuvring was set over against the interesting fact that we fought our sham battles at Sakkara, the City of the Dead, and our Brigade signallers flashed or flagged their messages from the Step Pyramid—the very oldest building in the world to-day. 'Going down to Egypt' had the same dangerous fascination for us as for the ancient Israelites, and padres had to be modern Isaiahs, warning the men of the languorous seductions which Egypt in modern times, as in ancient, holds out to men of a sturdy race.