The Squire's lecture was an immense success. The village school-house overbrimmed with his "people." With a big blackboard behind him, and chalk in hand, the lecturer talked simply and convincingly upon a subject at that time unfamiliar to his audience, a subject vital to any understanding of military movements. He explained the nature of platoons, companies, battalions, brigades, divisions and army corps. He presented, in short, an army in being. Loud applause greeted this first half of the lecture. The second half was devoted to the urgent cause of recruiting, and was not, perhaps, quite so enthusiastically acclaimed. The Squire, abandoning chalk and blackboard, thrust his hands in his pockets, and spoke trenchantly. We need not chronicle what he said. Men like him, all over the country, used the same arguments, almost exactly the same words. Such speakers forgot what had been said by Tweedledum and Tweedledee during the piping times of peace. Men and women, herded together, were invited to scrap the slow judgments and convictions of their lives. They had been assured again and again by politicians of variegated complexions that a mighty navy was fully adequate to defend our Empire against attack. Need it be added that such assurance, embodying as it did the accumulated wisdom and experience of generations, could not be cast incontinently as rubbish to the void. English politicians--using the word in the strongest antithesis to statesmen--have never realised the temper of the country towards themselves, the curious and striking indifference of the average man, engrossed in his own avocation, to any policy that he has not the wits or leisure to assimilate thoroughly. The confidence of this average man in the government of the moment has always been poignantly touching, a confidence stolidly based upon a belief in the fundamental common sense of the nation as a whole. Upset that belief, and the average man becomes at once helplessly befogged. After the Squire had spoken, old Captain Davenant said a few words in a more Cambyses' vein. Unhappily, the Captain lacked the geniality and persuasiveness of Sir Geoffrey. He believed in the choleric word, snapped out viciously. He spoke as he had often spoken in the barrack-yard, or in the hunting-field when some heavy-witted yokel had headed a fox. Probably he was shrewd enough to realise that this fox of recruiting might be headed, and governed himself accordingly. The Captain read the lessons on Sunday in the same peremptory tones, raising a rasping voice and glaring at the congregation--a very mirth-provoking performance. Uncle embodied the Nether-Applewhite verdict on such readings of the Scriptures: "'Tis a rare lark to hear 'un!"