There is probably more alien blood in England than these people think. They say that so-and-so is tainted by having an alien ancestor some generations back. But in nine cases out of ten they cannot give a complete list of their own great-great-grandparents, or even their great-grandparents; and the completest lists may not be quite conclusive. There was a wonderful old lady on a Dartmoor farm, ostensibly of English ancestry, but born about the time when French prisoners-of-war were out on parole there. I have seen her towering form, with eagle eye and outstretched hand, directing geese into their pond; and I have fancied that I saw a Marshal in Napoleon’s army launching a charge of cuirassiers. I have heard her say Bo to a goose. Few people say it now, and they never say it properly. If it is said in the right way, the goose turns round and waddles off at once, however much it may have hissed before. It is like Ahi with a horse in Italy. When the driver has flogged and progged in vain, as a last resort he says Ahi, and then the brute moves on. In my early days my grandfather would often talk of the French prisoners-of-war whom he remembered here a century ago; and I never imagined then that I was going to have prisoners-of-war working for me here, and that these prisoners would be German. They were quartered at Newton Abbot in the workhouse, and came out each day to work, returning for the night. I had nineteen here in the summer of 1918, though never more than six at once. There were six from Bavaria, three from Baden, two from Wurtemberg and one from Saxony; and seven were reckoned as Prussians, but two of these were from the Rhineland, two from Hannover, two from Hamburg and the other one from Silesia. They were the same kind of people that I have always met in rural parts of Germany--good-tempered and good-natured countryfolk, exceedingly unlike the Huns depicted by our Propaganda. However little we may like it, the Germans are our own kith and kin. Sixteen of those nineteen prisoners would certainly have passed as English, if they had been in English clothes and had not cut their hair so short. A person here confounded Hannover with Andover, and thought the Hannoverians were of English birth. Of course, language makes a gulf; and here it was not merely a matter of English and German. The prisoners spoke such different dialects that they could hardly understand each other, and the Yorkshire of the corporal in charge of them was not exactly like our Devonshire here. Quite early in the War the people here discovered that all Belgians were not angels, and I think they are discovering that all Germans are not devils. But at first the prisoners were not welcome. Looking at them from the road, a man declared he would not stand in the same field with them. A girl who heard him, looked at him, and was unkind enough to say, “No, not in the same battle-field.”