The good work performed by the scavengers may be thus summed up. If dead bodies and the refuse of food were left about everywhere freely on the open, germs of disease and putrefaction would fly about much more commonly than even at present. But a large number of scavenger animals, scavenger birds, and scavenger insects--hyenas, vultures, burying beetles, and so forth--act as public servants to prevent this calamity. Again, the earth needs the bodies and the refuse as fertilizers: and many of the scavengers carry down such materials into the first layer of the soil, where they become of enormous use in promoting the freer growth of vegetation. Thus, long before men learnt to bury their dead or to manure their fields, nature had invented both these processes, and registered them, so to speak, in the instincts and habits of a special class of insect sextons and sanitary inspectors. It is always so in life. There is hardly a human trade or a human activity which does not find its counterpart somewhere in animal or vegetable life: and it will be my object, in future numbers of these papers, to set before you in other directions some such natural anticipations or foreshadowings of man's inventions. [Illustration: Weepin' Willie By Albert Trapmann] I. Private William Fox was swaggering down the road to Shorncliffe Camp; that is to say, he was trying to swagger as much as his 5ft. 2in. of stature would allow. For the prettiest girl in Folkestone was holding on affectionately to his left arm, and in his right hand he displayed to full advantage his new silver-topped cane, the result of several weeks' savings. "Little Willie," as his comrades of the 210th line called him, was the most "special" of "special enlistments." He had enlisted at a time when a war scare was running riot throughout the country, and the inspector-surgeon had passed him, saying that he was sure to grow to standard height as he was only just eighteen, although it was evident to anyone who glanced at the set look of his shoulders that he would never be a hair's-breadth taller than he was. It was certainly rather trying to his three-month-old martial dignity to have the street urchins asking him as he strutted through the town whether "his ma knew he was out"--but that was nothing to the jeers of the men of his company, and Little Willie had not found the life of a soldier of the Queen as alluring as the recruiting sergeant had painted it.