Unless by the learned author of _Minor Horrors of War_, who knows all about the fauna of the trenches. * * * * * THE PERFECT CUSTOMER. It was a very ordinary country sale of work. The Countess of Bilberry declared it open in a neat little speech, and then bought generously from every stall: her daughter, whose smile nobody could resist, did a fine trade with raffle tickets for the record pumpkin produced by the local allotments: Mrs. Dodd, the Rector's wife, presided over a pair of scales and a strictly rationed tea, and all the rest of the village sold vegetables and socks and pincushions, and tried to pretend that antimacassars and shaving tidies and woolwork waistbelts were the most desirable things in the world when they were made by wounded men at the nearest Red Cross Hospital, in whose aid the sale was held. But there was one unique figure amongst all the folk who knew each other, and each other's clothes, and each other's clothes' cost, so well. She arrived at the Village Hall in a pony-carriage, drawn by the ugliest little pony that ever sniffed oats. She was very quietly and very tastefully dressed, and, instead of concentrating on the well-laden stalls of garden produce or the orderly stacks of knitted comforts, or the really useful baskets, she went straight to the stall which even Mrs. Dodd, who had the kindest heart in the countryside, had been compelled to relegate to a dark corner. There was woolwork run riot over cushions of incredible hardness; there were candle-shades guaranteed to catch alight at the mere sight of a match; there were crochet dressing-table mats, and there was a three-legged stool on which even a fairy could not have sat without danger of a break-down. The youngest Miss Dodd, a severely practical young lady of sixteen, who was presiding at this stall, jumped up in surprise at the sight of a customer, and in doing so knocked over a glass box bound with red and white and blue ribbon, with "Handkerchiefs" painted across the corner in a design of forget-me-nots. There was very little glass box left when she picked it up, and the splinters had made a good many little craters in the surface of a big bowl of clotted cream, labelled "Positively the last appearance for the Duration of the War," which was at the corner of the next stall. The little stranger said that she would take the box and the damaged cream too; she bought a whole family of crochet mats with centres of orange woollen loops; three pincushions made of playing cards discharged as no longer fit for active service; a table-centre with pen-painting of the Allied flags, and a letter-case with the badges of the Dominions worked in wool and "Across the sea, A letter from thee," straggling wearily across one corner. Then there was an antimacassar in purple and magenta sateen, with yellow daffodils making a brave attempt to flourish in unlikely surroundings.