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that to an onlooker must have seemed strange.

As he set down his glass he started as if he had forgotten something, and jerked out his watch.

"You will excuse me, monsieur. I should like to tell more stories of Jacques Stilton, for there are many. But at four o'clock I must be at the Ministère of War, and I shall have to hurry. To-night I go back to the front.

"I will take a message to Jacques Stilton?"

"Tell him I hate him."

"Pardon, monsieur, I do not understand. Will you write it on your carte

de visite?"

He stared at it a full minute before he looked up, bewildered.

"Yet I do not understand. You cannot hate him. He is too brave. Also he would smile at you; then you must love him, like all the world."

Fall turned into winter, and winter into spring, bringing no more news than a paragraph in the newspapers which stated that Sous-Lieutenant Jacques Stilton du Premier Étranger had been decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honor for conspicuous bravery in action.

One sunny afternoon in May I returned home to find myself for once anxiously awaited. No sooner had I set foot in the entryway than the door of the concierge's lodge popped open and was immediately replaced by the bulk of the concierge, reinforced by his plump little wife and numerous budding concierges in a staring row behind him.

'Monsieur!" he stammered excitedly; "monsieur! It is already two times that one has telephoned from the Ambulance Américaine that monsieur should come there at once. I have tried to find monsieur by telephone at the restaurants, and even now the petit Jules searches!"

I knew that hospital too well to be much disturbed. All their calls were assoon-as-possible ones. Nevertheless, I set out at once on the long trip to Neuilly, wondering whether I was to help with the new ward or whether some one of the staff was ill, so that I would be required for another siege at the sterilizer.

I had left the street-car and was negotiating the two long blocks which still

separated me from the hospital, when I passed my old tailor, headed in the opposite direction, hobbling blindly along, a prey to violent grief. I wanted to call him, but, realizing the embarrassment and the impossibility of consolation, I kept on.

Farther along my surprise was further increased on passing the sobbing, voluminous figure of my tobacco merchant. She had closed her shop during the busiest part of the day!

Inside the gate I came upon the fourteen-year-old daughter of Jim's concierge, arms filled with a bunch of roses that must have cost her savings of many a day. "Oh, monsieur! Is it not terrible!" she burst out tearfully. I knew then.

"They will not let me see him, monsieur," she sobbed, "not even for one little minute. I was afraid to cry there, and I ran away so quickly that I forgot my flowers. Will you take them to him? I will wait here to know."

His nurse slipped out of his room and closed the door behind her.

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"He's been asking for you ever since this morning, when he regained consciousness. But please don't stay longer than two minutes. There isn't much left," she concluded sadly, "yet he may have the misfortune to live."

Tucked up among the pillows there met my eyes three medals and Jim's smile.

"You old devil!" he exclaimed, feebly holding out his left arm. The stump of the right one twitched convulsively.

"You old devil!" he repeated, as fiercely as his weakened voice would permit. "Look what a job you've got! . . . Got to trundle me around rest of your life! The beggars clipped my spine!... "Couldn't take these, though! (He glanced lovingly down at his medals, the full triumvirate: Croix de Guerre, Médaille

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Militaire, and Légion d'Honneur.) But Miss Hempstead gave me only one minute. . . . Here's a check. (It was for fifty thousand francs.) . . . Had a deuce of a time signing it. See, Miss Hempstead was witness! . Soldiering's good for the finances. Give half to suffering people of our quarter. Must be a lot of them by now other half to orphans at Etretât. Saw some on way there. . . . Haunted me ever since. . . . All papers in trunk. Thank the little girl for flowers!" He paused for a moment, gasping, then slowly held out his hand as once more he smiled up into my eyes.

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Three medals and Jim's smile.

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Any game creature which moves is beautiful to me when viewed along a gun-barrel.

THE GAME-BIRD OF THE FUTURE

S

By Henry Wysham Lanier

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR

OMETHING (I fancy it was a sonnet in sweet potatoes by black Maître Robert) had caused a momentary pause in that daily, pitiful evening occupation of trying to figure out just how that overeducated fissiparous covey by the "Big Back Swamp" had managed to get away unharmed-and why they couldn't do it again next day. My mind strayed to other aspects of the sport which had so engrossed me.

I turned to the pink-cheeked youth of eighty beside me. (He has a habit, which can only be described as "devilish," of coming home to lunch with the limitwhile I am still floundering about in the "bays," forgetting the bull-briers twined lovingly around my neck and legs in an intense determination to get, somehow, the other half of that dozen birds, which I had visualized at starting as the least bag becoming a sportsman of my age and ardor.)

"How is it," I asked, "that a man like you, who hunts the whole season, can concentrate so on quail, to the exclusion of all other shooting?"

The p. c. y. fixed upon me the same expression with which he regards a latehatched, cheeping, half-feathered interloper in a covey of hurtling January birds. "There isn't any other kind of shooting," he remarked.

I haven't reached that pinnacle yet. Heine notes the curious fact that "of course, no woman is ugly"-and it's equally true that any game creature which moves is beautiful to me when viewed along a gun-barrel. The feel of a stock against your cheek-but analogies that start from Heine are perilous: suffice it to say that I am one of those born slaves of the magician's hollow steel wand to whom happiness consists in hearing a gun go off-with a chance of seeing something drop ahead. Yet if those superior persons who deplore the barbarism of sport,

if these were in charge of the world, and were about to abolish all kinds of gameshooting save one, certain it is that my vote would let everything else go-yes, from caribou to jack-snipe to save Bobwhite for the sportsman.

There are a number of excellent reasons

the doorway appears the cheerful blackness of Uncle Isham's countenance above a huge armful of "fat" wood and pine logs. "Mawnin', sah. Yessah, col' foh sho"," says he. "Had to brek ice to wateh de mule dis mawnin'."

He kneels before the fireplace, piles up four-foot logs on the andirons, with plenty of lightwood knots and splinters beneath, strikes a match-and in a moment the room is full of glare and resinous odor.

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Buggies, from which peer anxious dogs, are grouped under the tall pines. -Page 241.

for this preference-though your true quail specialist would no more descend to them than would Falstaff. Before articulating these bones of fact, let me invoke the aid of whatever "winged words" our prose affords, to give you who are sceptical some faint sense of what Carolina quail-shooting means.

You are lying in that luxurious state between sleeping and waking, just conscious enough to be pervaded with the pleasant knowledge-first, that outside the open door the earth lies chill beneath a heavy rime of frost, while you relax snugly under three blankets and a comfort; and, secondly, that the world of duties and business and scurry is blotted out, while there unrolls before you a vision of thirty ecstatic days in the happy hunting-grounds. Before this realization has lost the least of its roseate hues, a heavy tread sounds on the porch outside the bedroom; there is the thump of a log on the boards; and in

"Breakfas' at eight o'clock, sah," remarks Isham, departing to perform his fire rites in the other bedrooms of the bungalow.

Eight o'clock is an hour away. The flickering light and ocean-like roar from the old fireplace are hypnotizing: there is a refinement of sybaritism in lolling there and wondering if a cat-nap, while the room is warming, might not give an extra flavor to the anticipation which is going to tauten the nerves presently. But then gun and shells and shooting-clothes are to be unpacked. Still, there's no hurry-. And presently your nerves string tight, and your brain clears with a click, and you leap out of bed into a realization that you have just twenty minutes in which to get ready.

The morning sun is blazing through the vine-covered marten-box in front of the house, and the fire is so hot that you throw open a window-to lose a few more minutes in listening to a mocking-bird in the glossy green mock-orange-tree, who sings as if his name must be Franz Schubert.

On the hearth stands a great brown earthenware jug filled with water, which is now actually boiling from its nearness to that fiery furnace of pine: even shaving is a luxury under such circumstances.

The last part of the toilet, and the unpacking of gun and ammunition, are hurried by the sound of the gong for

breakfast, served at a long table in the living-room that runs right through the bungalow. This is a light repast of fruit, broiled quail and woodcock, bacon and eggs, kidney stew, frizzled beef, hominy, corn fritters, corn bread, hot rolls, and other similar trifles, always topping the edifice with half a dozen or more buckwheat cakes and syrup, which means a third cup of the ambrosia Robert dispenses under the title of coffee.

Outside, the brilliant sun has already melted all the frost except in the shadows; guides and buggies, from which peer anxious dogs, are grouped under the tall pines back of the bungalow; everything becomes intent but unhurried preparation for

to make room for two pairs of feet; the after-breakfast pipe sends a thread of smoke up into the still air; "Giddap, Kitty mule," says Frank; and we are off.

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His tail has a ludicrous downward twist; ... that crook brings back vividly his grandfather, "the finest hunting-dog that ever was."-Page 242.

Though we are starting on a three-pipe drive, the second dog, old Lookout, runs beside the wagon: a tenmile jaunt is hardly sufficient to get his eagerness down to the manageable point. He trots along, every muscle showing the strain of repression; one wary eye glances back at us as he draws ahead almost imperceptibly; then, just as he is about to make a wild dash off into a corn-field, a stern "Heel!" brings him reluctantly back -until in five minutes the inner steampressure becomes too great, and it's all gone through with again.

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Frozen to marble, eyes strained and eager.-Page 242.

the day's work. Lunch, water-bottles, gun, and shells are stowed away in the wagon; a heavy ulster goes on over canvas shooting-coat; little Di, on the floor of the buggy, is coiled up somehow so as

On we drive, through the silent pinewoods, with straight, tall columns between which shafts of sunshine strike the red

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