My eye wanders on over the bowed heads. Finally it reaches the third pew from the front, and I am aware of the handsome presence of my friend Eric Bethune, of Buckholm. Beside him, bolt upright, with a critical eye fixed upon Doctor Chirnside, sits his eccentric lady mother. Eric’s attitude is more devout, but I observe that his head is turned sideways, and that he is grinning sympathetically at Tommy Milroy over the way, whose little nose is being relentlessly pressed to the book-board by an iron maternal hand encased in a hot black kid glove. Eric, although he is as old as myself, is still very much of a boy—or perhaps I ought, in strict candour, to say a child. He was a child at school—in his exuberant vitality, his sudden friendships, his petulance. He was a child at Sandhurst; he was a child as a subaltern—at times, almost a baby. But he has been my friend all my life, and I admire him more than any man I know; perhaps because he possesses all the qualities which I lack. He is tall and debonair; I am—well, neither. He is impulsive, frank, and popular; I am cautious, reticent and regarded as a little difficult. (This is not true really, only there is no Eve now to tell me what to say to people.) But, above all, Eric is a soldier. In the South African War he was Adjutant of our Second Battalion. They were sent out rather late, and only got to work after Paardeburg. I was with the other battalion, and saw nothing of Eric, but his Colonel considered him the smartest Adjutant in the Division, and recommended him for the D.S.O. He got it, but always declared that he had had no chance to earn it, except by instructing the men very thoroughly in what is vulgarly known as the art of "Spit and Polish." Certainly they were the best turned-out crowd I have ever seen, when they marched through the streets of Edinburgh on their return.