That struck the Canadian as the last word in lunacy; but before he could speak, he saw the barrel dissolved in splintering wreckage about the figure lying on the road. Tommy raised his head a little and called once more, but faintly. ‘Good fight. We did all we could ... to stop ’em. We did stop ’em all a good time ... an’ we stopped a lot for good.’ A gust of bullets swept lower, clattered on the stones, set the broken barrel staves dancing, hailed drumming and thudding on the prone figure in the road. Both the Canadian and the Frenchman were wounded severely, but they still had the strength to crawl back along the ditch, and the luck to emerge from it amongst the houses in time to be hidden away by the villagers before the Germans arrived. And that night after they had passed through and gone, the Canadian went back and found the body of the soldier where it had been flung in the ditch—a body riddled and rent to pieces with innumerable bullet wounds. The Canadian had the villagers bury the body there close outside the village, and wrote on a smooth board the number and name he took from the identity disc about the dead man’s neck. And underneath it he wrote in indelible pencil ‘A good fighting man,’ and the last words he had heard the fighter gasp—‘We did all we could to stop them; stopped them all a good time, and stopped a lot for good.’ And as the Canadian said afterwards, ‘That same, if you remember their record and their fate, being a fairly close fitting epitaph for the old Contemptible Little Army.’ FOOTNOTES [3] ‘_Jildi_’—quick. _A PEEP AT AN OLD PARLIAMENT._ BY SIR HENRY LUCY. A short time ago an unknown friend, ‘thinking it may interest you,’ sent me what turned out to be a precious volume. Its full title runs thus: ‘Random Recollections of the House of Commons from the Year 1830 to the Close of 1835, including Personal Sketches of the Leading Members of all Parties; by One of No Party.’ Readers of the CORNHILL will be not the less attracted by it since, as the imprint shows, it was published in 1836 by the eminent firm of Smith, Elder & Co., at that date located at Cornhill. Throughout the volume ‘One of No Party,’ whom, for the sake of brevity, I will in future refer to by the letter Q, preserves his anonymity. In a modest preface he describes himself as ‘during a very regular attendance in the House of Commons for several years past being in the habit of taking notes of what was most interesting in the proceedings, as well as of the personal and oratorical peculiarities of the leading members.’ As ‘One of No Party’ and all the historical personages who live again under the magic of his graphic pen have long since passed on to another state, it would not be indiscreet if the day-books of the old firm in Cornhill for the year 1835 were looked through and his identity revealed.