to avoid treading upon them, and though more than once he deserted the trench for the clean earth of the plains, his friend the sniper was bent on each occasion upon showing him that he was still a happy memory to him, and he was forced to descend again. However, it was over at last, and with the greatest relief that he had ever experienced he found himself in the shelter of the outlying houses of Loos. Here for a few minutes he stood and studied a plan with which he had been provided. His objective was the Pylons, easy enough to see, certainly, but unfortunately on the far side of an open square or market-place by the church, upon which the German gunners were making very pretty practice with field guns and light howitzers. There was nothing for it but to find a way round, along the streets choked with rubbish and torn by great craters, taking short cuts through gardens converted into cemeteries, in which the dead lying on the surface were more numerous than those below, across courtyards wherein the horses who had been stabled there lay where the flying bullets had found them. Strange work, this threading of the city of the dead, the sense of isolation growing as one advanced until one seemed a visitant to a world struck by a celestial bombardment that had left none alive to tell the tale. Troops there were in plenty, but they remained in the wonderful excavations that had been made; none, save rarely a messenger, crouching behind a wall as the whizz and roar of the shell echoed amongst the torn buildings, racing across an open space in a brief interval of quiet, ventured forth, unless before dawn to relieve his companions who were stationed in the hastily-dug trenches in front of the village. But during the course of this expedition my friend discovered a very valuable fact, namely, that the principal fire of the enemy was directed only upon certain spots, and was not being distributed indiscriminately over the village. Avoid these spots, and except for a few casual "universal" bursting overhead, one was perfectly safe, _voilà tout_! But that same casual universal is a very jumpy toy. You hear it coming, certainly, but far too quickly for you to do anything, and before you know where you are it has burst just over you with an ear-splitting crack, and small fragments hit the ground all round you with a most unpleasant thud. "Woolly bears," the men call them, for they leave a curious cotton-wool-like wreath of smoke in the air for some seconds, much larger and more lasting than the puff of a shrapnel.