The first line of a certain popular song emphasises a bold and truthful platitude, namely: "The World’s growing older each day." The incontrovertible fact is plumped unexpectedly before us, and blocks our only exit down the passage of argument. If it had read: "The World’s growing _smaller_ each day," we might have run to our text-book of Elementary Physics, and, placing a stubby but argumentative forefinger on the Law of the Indestructibility of Matter, have proved it a falsehood of the Nth. degree. But, of course, this must all have happened before the War. Every one knows now—every Tommy can tell you—that the world is really and truly smaller; for, if not, how is it he meets Bill, or Jake, or Harry on the streets of _Poperinghe_ or _Dickibusch_? He knows instinctively that the world is shrinking, and Halifax and Vancouver may be found any time jumbled together in a little Belgian village on the wrong side of the Atlantic. I hadn’t seen Jack Wellcombe for twenty-five years—we had been school chums together—and his name had almost faded from the pages of my mind; so that on entering the hospital the morning after Reggy’s last dinner, I received a slight shock as I lifted a new chart from the table and saw this name staring up at me: "Captain J. Wellcombe. Royal Army Medical Corps." Had the world really become so small? Could a quarter century be bridged in an instant? I seemed to see the little old stone schoolhouse once again; its low-ceilinged room, the big box-stove, the well-hacked seats, and the rows of little boys and girls bowed over their greasy slates. The scent of midday lunches stowed away floated back to me in memory’s dream, and the haw-tree brushed its leaves against the window pane. I saw Jack as he was then, with frank blue eyes and waving golden hair—courteous, genial and big-hearted, beloved by all; and I wondered as I stood there if by any chance this might be he. The nursing sister awoke me from this reverie: "He arrived in the early morning," she volunteered, "but as he was not seriously hurt I didn’t call you, and dressed the wound myself." It was with a feeling of nervous tension and expectancy that I followed her down the hall to his room and entered. Alas! the world is full of disappointments. It was not Jack—this dignified man with the touch of grey about the temples—but still the resemblance grew stronger, the kindly blue eyes, the same winsome smile—I wondered still. We passed the customary greetings and chatted commonplaces for a few moments, and all the time his face wore an expression of puzzled enquiry, as if he too were trying to recall some faint memory from the past. At last I blurted out: "Are you by any chance related to Jack Wellcombe, of K——?"