We were the only visitors at the comfortable grey-gabled hotel at Z⸺ and absorbed and gladly held the friendly, if undemonstrative, attention of the tiny village, a row of little houses set by the lochside on a sheep-trimmed sward where bare-legged children with dark bright eyes kept holiday from dawn to dusk in company with a couple of sheep dogs and a pack of wise-faced, short-legged terriers. Thatched cottages from whose moss-grown roofs grass and ferns sprouted, and low stone houses whose walls were gay with scarlet fuchsias and blazing tropœlum crouched behind fenced gardens in which the prose of potatoes and cabbages was enlivened by the invasion of tall blood-red poppies with navy-blue hearts and grey-green leaves. We had been a week at Z⸺, a week of undiminished fervour as explorers within a three-mile radius, favoured with warm sunshine and blessed by the sight of mountains, sea, and sky varying almost from minute to minute in colour, character and atmosphere, when the Highland Anzac descended from a dog-cart at our very door. We had lazily breakfasted in our rooms, and I was dressing at the moment but peeped behind the blind in time to catch a glimpse of the broad-brimmed hat of the tall soldier. Instantly I pinned my _Australia_ brooch (the shoulder and hat badge of the Australian Imperial Force) into my tie and sent my maid to tell Phœbe of her countryman’s approach. Before I was ready to leave my room I heard her welcoming the new-comer. Had he been the last and least of Australia’s soldiers he must have responded to the friendship in her warm, deep tones; but he was of the true and the best type—the type now familiar to English eyes, yet, somehow, exotic still. Nearly six feet high is Donald Macleod, rose-bronze of skin, broad of shoulder and lean of limb; square-browed and endowed with well-opened eyes of a blue, now bright, now shadowed, like the waters of a mountain tarn, and fringed with thick black lashes. When he laughs he squeezes up his eyes till the dark fringes interlace, and his small teeth flash white between lips not full but kindly and humorous. He is a corporal, and we believe him to be twenty-four. Born in New South Wales and educated at the best of Sydney’s schools—and they are very good—he travelled westward like the rising sun to Perth (W.A.). A pearl-fisher of Broome by choice and occupation, he basked for a few years in and on the sunny waters of a tropical archipelago, and when the Empire wanted him he came, one of twenty-two Macleods, expatriated patriots of his clan who, from the simple private to the distinguished colonel, have left their all at the Antipodes to follow the old flag. He was in the first division of the A.I.F. to see service in Flanders, and there to the slight wound he had received at Gallipoli he added five others, all in his left side, which chiefly interest him as providing a reason for his joining the Australian Flying Corps, a service in which he would not have to carry a pack.