He paused and threw his head back with a queer laugh before he continued in a new tone, “It was just a silly nightmare, that’s all. And it had its inevitable element of the grotesque. In the middle of that waste there was a scarecrow, a live scarecrow--digging. Digging turnips, if you please. Oh! it was bosh, of course, absolute bosh. I shall have forgotten all about it next week. But I couldn’t give the crystal to the little girl after that. You can keep it. Tell me if you get anything....” So I kept the crystal, and sometimes stared into it. But no vision came to me. * * * * * It was in the late autumn of 1919 that Strickland got permission to go out to France. The war had made an old man of him, although he was little over sixty; and he begged me to go with him. “I should like you to help me,” he said. “I have a feeling that we might, perhaps, hear something about that young rascal of mine. ‘Wounded and missing,’ you know, always leaves one with just a hope.” The first beautiful release of peace was passing then into that restless craving for immense action which affected us all so strongly at that time; and the feeling was aggravated in my case by the realisation of impotence. I was too old to help. I accepted Strickland’s offer, eagerly.... I do not believe that he remembered his vision when, after a week’s fruitless enquiry, we came one afternoon to the historic desert that had once been beautiful France. Certainly, he made no reference to his old experience; but he was almost senile. I noticed a difference in him, even in that one week. But _I_ remembered; and I had a fit of cold shivering that I could not control when we came out on to the awful plain that they now call The Plain of the Dead, and saw the figure of that one demented peasant, dressed in the grotesque relics of two nations’ uniforms. He was digging feverishly with his pointed spade, and I heard the ring of it as it struck. It was not a turnip that he wrenched up. The thing rolled towards us.... Young Strickland’s head had always been a queer shape. A DIFFERENCE OF TEMPERAMENT The differences between “young” Royce and “old” Bunnett had a dramatic quality that stirred even the wearied indifference of Stamp and Co.’s counting-house to simple efforts in psychological analysis. Young Royce was dark, square, and determined; a reasoned boaster, who verified his boasts by action. When he made what sounded like a very rash assertion, it was bad policy to contradict, and quite fatal to bet against him. Old Bunnett was tall and thin, fair, drooping, and despondent. He seldom committed himself to a confident statement of opinion, but gravely, almost voluptuously, hoped for the worst on every possible occasion. He was, by the office’s classification, of the same breed as “old Robinson,” who had come into the firm as a boy of fourteen and had now served his employers faithfully for fifty-one years.