On the evening before, our guest--a young lieutenant--was to go on leave, he got very uneasy. As gulls scent the approach of stormy weather and come inland, or blackbirds and larks feel the approach of winter and migrate to summer lands, so men can sometimes scent danger and coming death. He had with him a bottle of whisky, and he kept it on the table outside my tent--a safe place for it. "I don’t mind telling you, Padre," he said, as he poured out a glass, "I’ve got the ’wind-up’ badly to-night. I don’t like the feel of things. I would rather be in the trenches than here, because I know what is likely to happen there, but here in the open I feel strange and unprotected. I shall be glad when it is morning." His feeling was quite natural. We always feel another man’s dangers more than our own because they are new to us and we don’t know what to expect or how to meet them. A man will choose a big danger that he is used to, sooner than a lesser danger that is new to him. Besides, the lieutenant had his "leave-warrant" in his breast pocket and that will sap any man’s courage. He has a feeling that the shells are after his "leave-warrant" and that the gunners know where it is. He suspects that fate is malignant and takes a special delight in killing a man when he is on the way to "Blighty." Many a man has been killed with a "leave-warrant" in his pocket, or "commission papers" in it which were taking him home. Our doctor told me how one night he and the chaplain who preceded me were riding on the front of an ambulance car when a shell burst and with a fragment killed the chaplain. In the padre’s pocket was his warrant, and he was taking his last ride before going home; but instead of going home in "Blighty" he went to his _long_ home, and the warrant lies in the grave with him. A man feels particularly vulnerable when the long-looked-for "leave-warrant" is in his pocket. He does not fear death after "leave," but he does on the eve of "leave." He wants one more look at his home and loved ones before going on the long and lone journey which, despite all the comfort which the Christian religion gives, still retains much of its terror to the human spirit. There have been few better Christians than Samuel Johnson and John Bunyan, but neither of them could contemplate fording the river of death without misgivings. When they came to it they found it much less formidable than they had expected. Had they been at the Front with "leave-warrants" in their pockets to "Fleet Street, London," or "Elstow, Bedford," I fancy neither of them would have taken undue risks.