[2] One is much tempted to regard this epithet as inserted by some dull-pated player who did not see that in Hotspur’s eyes to be Hotspur’s friend would be desert enough without addition. The lines would then read, to the advantage of the metre:— ‘_Glend._ Come, you shall have Trent turn’d. _Hot._ I do not care: I’ll give thrice so much land to any friend.’ The metrical reason would be of little weight if it stood alone; still the irregularity of the verse as printed is particularly jarring, however one tries to arrange the lines. [3] It is conspicuous in Drayton’s ‘The Battaile of Agincourt.’ [4] There were limits to Shakespeare’s carelessness, and I believe this enormous anachronism to be wilful. [5] The insertion of ‘man’—actually made in the later folios—or ‘one’ is an obvious but not obviously necessary emendation. [6] It may be irreverent to doubt whether Shakespeare knew or regarded the difference between a petard and a mine; yet it is certain that a petard was not fitted to _hoist_ anything, but was a special contrivance for blowing in gates and the like. It was a novelty in the third quarter of the sixteenth century (Littré, _s.v._). Drayton understood its use, but by a slip as bad as any of Shakespeare’s brought ‘the Engineer providing the Petar, to breake the strong Percullice’ into Henry V.’s war: ‘The Battaile of Agincourt,’ ed. Garnett, p. 22. [7] A considerable anachronism, but these are trifles. _THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: THE REARGUARD._ BY BOYD CABLE. All day long Papa Laval had been wandering about the streets of the little town, listening restlessly to the distant thunder of the guns, questioning eagerly the first of the fugitive peasantry who came streaming through in their flight towards safety. Papa Laval with his one arm and his cripple leg and his tales of ’70-’71 was naturally an authority on matters of war, and his fellow-townsmen listened deferentially to all he had to say about affairs. Papa was scornful of the first tales the fugitives told of a German victory and an Allies’ retreat; but the first rumble of heavy transport wagons through the cobbled streets in the middle of the night brought him quickly from his bed and down the narrow stairs to find out what it meant. He could learn nothing much because the transport drivers were English, could only take some comfort from the calm with which they steered through the crowded street, laughed and called jokes which none understood down to the staring townsfolk. But Papa had seen too much of war not to understand the meaning of the swelling tide of transport, to mark as the light grew the jaded horses and the sleep-worn looks of the drivers. His dismay grew when the khaki regiments began to flood through after the toiling transport, while out behind them the growling thunder of the guns rolled louder and louder.