Another boy, an Englishman, got out of the trench one day to stretch his legs, as he said he was tired of sitting still. Some one called to him to come down and not be a fool, as the Germans were keeping up a constant rifle fire, and after a minute or two he jumped back into the trench. "They didn't get you, did they?" called out some one. "Oh, no!" he answered, sitting down. Then all of a sudden he just keeled over slowly sideways without a sound, and, believe me, when they went to pick him up he was as dead as David--plugged clean through the heart. He never even felt the shock of it. If they do ever get me, that's the way I hope to die. BERT HALL. FRENCHMAN MEETS THAT STRANGE BEING, TOMMY ATKINS. LATTER'S UN-FRENCH WAYS AMUSINGLY DEPICTED BY PARISIAN JOURNALIST FOR HIS READERS. The thousands of English soldiers now on French soil are, to Frenchmen, strange, exotic creatures, the study of which is full of delightful surprises. Recently a French journalist traveled to the trenches, interviewed several specimens of the genus Tommy Atkins, and published the results in a Paris newspaper. One Tommy was "of the species crane," with thin legs and arms like telegraph wires, by no means as taciturn as the Frenchman had believed Englishmen to be. He told the Frenchman some tall yarns. "In one fight our battalion lost five hundred men," he vouchsafed. "One bullet, which just scratched my nose, killed my pal beside me." Another Tommy dwelt on the awful fact that he had been "twenty-two days on water without any tea in it." He, too, had been in the thick of the fray and had killed several of the enemy with his own hand, which, recounts the Frenchman, filled him with "a gentle joy." "Are the inhabitants of this part of France hospitable?" the journalist inquired of another Englishman. "Awfully nice!" replied the soldier. These words the correspondent, after giving them in English, to show how strange they look, translates: "Terriblement aimable"--a combination which must appear perfectly incomprehensible to Frenchmen, who do not see how a thing can be "awful" and "nice" at the same time. At a village in Northern France the newspaper man found some English soldiers instructing a lot of village boys in the rudiments of football. "When the French team scored a point," he writes, "I said to one of the Englishmen: 'But aren't you ashamed to let them beat you at your own game?' To which the Briton replied: 'Ah, but we want to encourage the people of France to take up sports!'" Football was being played wherever there were Englishmen. Often the games were between teams of English and French soldiers. Where a ball was not to be had, the players were quite content to kick about a bundle of clothes. When not thus engaged, the English soldier finds time to enter the lists of Cupid. The French writer tells of one Tommy whom he saw "promenading proudly before the awe-struck glances of the villagers with three girls on his arm!"