Then suddenly your War dog disappears. You are just beginning to live him down--having moved into another area--when you espy him from the street, the centre of a noisy group in a not too reputable wine-shop. But the War dog never recognises you. He has finished with you--grown tired of you, in fact (he rarely "works" the same victim for more than three weeks). You and your battalion are to him as it were a bone picked clean; and you depart with a prayer that he may die a stray's death at the hands of the Military Police. One month travelling snugly in a G.S. waggon (you never catch him marching like an honest mascot), the next "swinging the lead" in some warm dug-out--there are few moves on the board of the great War game that he does not know. He will patronise a score of regiments in three months; travel from one end of the Western Front to the other and back again, taking care never to attempt to renew an old acquaintance. Occasionally he makes the mistake of running across a mitrailleuse battery with its dog-teams needing reinforcements, or tries to billet himself on a military pigeon-loft and meets a violent death. But whatever fortune may bring him we can confidently assert that he is much too fly to chance his luck across the border and into the land where the sausage-machines guard the secret of perpetual motion. * * * * * IN WILD WALES. Dwarfing the town that to the hillside clings On terraced slopes, the castle, nobly planned And noble in its ruined greatness, flings Its double challenge to the sea and land. Oh, if the ancient spirit of the place Could win free utterance in articulate tones, What tales to hearten and inspire and brace Would issue from these grey and lichened stones! Once manned and held by paladin and peer, Now tenanted by jackdaws, bats and owls, Save when the casual tourist through its drear And grass-grown courts disconsolately prowls. Once famous as the scene of Border fights, Now watching, in the greatest war of all, Old men, with their bilingual acolytes, Beating, outside its gates, a little ball; While on the crumbling battlements on high, Where mail-clad men-at-arms kept watch and ward, Adventurous sheep amaze the curious eye Instead of grazing on the level sward. But though such incongruities may jar The sense of fitness in a mind fastidious, Modernity has wholly failed to mar The face of Nature here, or make it hideous. Inland the amphitheatre of hills Sweeps round with Snowdon as their central crest, And murmurs of innumerable rills Blend with the heaving of the ocean's breast. Already Autumn's fiery finger laid On heath and marsh and woodland far and wide In all their gorgeous pageantry has arrayed The tranquil beauties of the countryside.