"Well, what I say is, Down here, in this corner of the world--though, mind you, I'm not sayin' anything against it--you don't _reelise_ things: you reely don't. Now I come from Bodmin, as I think I must have told you." "You did." "Where you see the soldiers goin' about with the stripes down their trowsers: but they've done away with that except for the Yeomanry (which is black, or dark blue, I forget which), and that's how you know the difference. So your mind gets enlarged almost without your knowin' it, and you feel what's at stake." "I wonder you didn' want to enlist," said Nicky-Nan. "I did: but I was too tall--too tall _and_ too strong," sighed the policeman, bending his arm and causing his biceps to swell up mountainously. "You haven't a notion how strong I am--if, for instance, I took it into my head to catch you up and heave you over the Quay here. Yes, yes, I am wonderfully well made! And on top of that, Mother picked up some nonsense against soldiering off a speaker at a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon. There was nothing for it but the Force. So here I AM. But give me the wings of a dove, and I'd join the Royal Flyin' Corps to-morrow, where they get higher pay because of the risk, same as with the submarines. If you ask _me_, every Englishman's post at this moment is in the firing line." Nicky-Nan winced, and changed the subject in haste. "Well, it must be a great consolation to have such strength as yours," he said pleasantly. "But I wonder--with nothing else doin', and on a Bank Holiday too--you could manage to stay away from the School Treat." "Rat it all!" broke out the constable, and checked himself. "I thought I was igsplaining to you," he went on as one who reasons patiently with an infant, "that a man has to think of something above an' beyond _self_ in these days." "I never found time to think out the rights an' wrongs o' warfare, for my part," said Nicky-Nan. "Ah, I daresay not." Policeman Rat-it-all blew out his chest. "It's a deep subject," he added, wagging his head solemnly. "A very deep subject; and I quite understand your not having time for it lately. How about that Ejectment Order?" Nicky-Nan jumped like a man shot. "Ha--have you got the--the thing about 'ee?" he twittered. "Don't tell me that Pamphlett has got 'em to send it down? . . . But there, you can't do anything on a Bank Holiday, anyway." "Have I got the thing about me?" echoed the policeman slowly. "You talk as if 'twas a box o' matches. . . . Well, I may, or I mayn't; but anyways I've followed the case before Petty Sessions; and if you haven't a leg to stand on, the only thing is to walk out peaceably. Mind, I'm puttin' it unofficial, as between friends." "And what if I don't?" "Then, rat it all!--I mean," the constable corrected himself to a tolerant smile and gazed down on his mighty hands and arms--"then I got to put you into the street."