He laughed, gladly. Then openly, unashamed, he stooped and took toll of her lips. Nor was he denied. And the other Nance, looking up from where she lay at their feet, tossed back a lock of hair and wagged her tail in approval. _FRAGMENTS FROM GERMAN EAST._ BY A SOLDIER’S WIFE. A still lagoon of veld, mile upon mile. Nowhere in the world, I should suppose, does the tide of battle ebb and flow so almost imperceptibly. Sometimes, only in echo, we hear the thunder of the overwhelming seas—sometimes, just now and then, the ripple at our feet breaks in a little cloud of spray and for a moment dims the eyes that are used to vast spaces, with sudden yearning for an island home beneath the far horizon, and perhaps hands tremble a little in tearing the wrapper from the daily newspaper. But enough for us, so far, has been our all unequal struggle with Nature, who turns our skies to steel and with fierce winds scatters the hovering clouds, while the young crops shrivel and the watersprings are dry and the eyes of the beasts wait upon us who can give them no meat in due season. A Kaffir boy comes round one evening and sings a doggerel he has fashioned from an old nigger melody, and others join in the foolish refrain: ‘I come to Basutoland, I come through lands and sea, I kill five thousand Germans, With my banjo on my knee.’ We laugh and throw him a tickey, and turn again to watch the skies—to-morrow, perhaps, the rains will come and we can plough and sow. For the dread hand that writes upon the wall has formed no fearful word for us—as yet—and sympathy, deep and very real as it is, stands in our lexicon as ‘a feeling for’ rather than ‘a feeling with.’ And then a cable calls me in haste to Durban to meet a returning transport and suddenly there is nothing in the world but war and its magnificence and its horror. The clusters of people at various stations who come to meet the mail train—the event of the day—the youths who slouch up and down the platform with loud voices and noisy jests, the girls who laugh with them, the groups of farmers talking of the crops—all these rouse me to a feeling of irritation, then to an impotent anger. ‘Come with me,’ I want to urge, ‘and I will take you where men are heroes in life and death.’ And again, ‘Is it nothing to you that your brothers agonise? Will you jest while the earth opens under your feet?’—and something ominous creeps into the meaningless laughter. And then at last comes Durban, and I am surrounded with war activities and what was sinister has vanished in the wholesomeness of sacrifice and strenuous work.