The discerning eye sees the flowers through the mist of steaming tea. We catch the perfume while we choke in the reek of tobacco smoke, damp clothes, and heated bodies. It is not every Y.M.C.A. which is honoured with a name. Sweet Lavender stands alone here among huts distinguished only by numbers. But surely they should all be called after flowers, for in them grow the sweetest blooms of all. _BILFRED._ BY JEFFERY E. JEFFERY. _... Fellow creature I am, fellow-servant_ _Of God: can man fathom God’s dealings with us?..._ _Oh! man! we, at least, we enjoy, with thanksgiving,_ _God’s gifts on this earth, though we look not beyond._ _You sin and you suffer, and we, too, find sorrow_ _Perchance through your sin—yet it soon will be o’er;_ _We labour to-day and we slumber to-morrow,_ _Strong horse and bold rider! and who knoweth more?_ A. LINDSAY GORDON. I. In some equine Elysium where there are neither flies nor dust nor steep hills nor heavy loads; where there is luscious young grass unlimited with cool streams and shady trees; where one can roam as one pleases and rest when one is tired: there, far from the racket of gun wheels on hard roads and the thunder of opposing artillery, oblivious of all the insensate folly of this warring human world, reposes, I doubt it not, the soul of Bilfred. His was a humble part. He was never richly caparisoned with embroidered bridle and trappings of scarlet and gold. He never swept over the desert beneath some Arab sheikh with the cry ‘Allah for all!’ ringing in his ears. He bore no general to victory, no king to his coronation. But he served his country faithfully, and in the end, when he had helped to make some history, he died for it. It is eight years since he joined the battery—a woolly-coated, babyish remount straight from an Irish dealer’s yard. Examining him carefully we found that beneath his roughness he was not badly shaped; a trifle long in the back perhaps, and a shade too tall—but then perfection is not attainable at the government price. There was no denying that his head was plain and his face distinctly ugly. From his pink and flabby muzzle a broad streak of white ran upwards to his forehead, widening on the near side so as almost to reach his eye. The grotesquely lop-sided effect of this was enhanced by a tousled forelock which straggled down between his ears. The question of naming him arose and some one said: ‘Except for his face, which is like nothing on earth, he’s the image of old Alfred that we cast last year.’ Now a system prevailed in the battery by which horses were called by names which began with the letter of their subsection. ‘Well,’ said some one else, ‘he’s been posted to B sub; why not call him Bilfred?’ And Bilfred he became.