mitted the O.C., 'but things are not always what they seem.'

"They are here,' I said. 'No complaints at this side of the counter.' And I looked hard at that O.C.

'Got home,' murmured the quartermaster. 'Reckon that's one to you, sir.' And they all laughed.

'Have you all the help you want?' went on the O.C. 'Fatigues come regularly? If you want more, you 've only to say so, and I reckon the adjutant

'Sure,' said the tall adjutant, with that characteristic smile of his. 'All you've got to do is to send along an orderly with a chit-'

Here the quartermaster broke in, afraid of being left out of the competition. The quartermaster always looked sardonic, but was rather a wag in disguise.

'And, of course,' he said, with a whimsical wave of his hand, the quartermaster's stores are entirely at your disposal.' And the insincerity of the man was so patent that he had the grace to laugh with us.

The inspection party were about to take their leave when fate plucked at the colonel's sleeve. It was only then he saw the untidy floor.

'Guess it's strange,' he said musingly, as he reviewed the offending bits, 'strange that when the boys have a nice place like this they would not take a pride in keeping it tidy.'

There was a horrid pause, during which I tried to make up my mind as to the best line of defense.

'Well, Colonel,' I said, hastily deciding that any defense was better than none, 'this is the way I look at it. You can't have everything. If those boys were always picking up their cigarette ends and keeping the daily papers neatly folded they'd make excellent housemaids, but poor soldiers.'

Then said the O.C. grimly: 'I

reckon these boys must be damn fine soldiers!' And laughing heartily, the party saluted again and went their

way.

Meanwhile the work of the hut never slackened: the clatter of cups and saucers still resounded, and the click of ivory balls came from the billiard room, while the piano rang out relentlessly. The sound of army boots tapping on the floor suggested that a 'buck and wing' dance was in progress. Over the heads of the crowd a khaki cap bobbed up and down, and under it was a black face. An American coon was giving an exhibition to a select but wrapt audience.

So the work went on. It was all very kaleidoscopic; men coming and going, groups forming and reforming, orderlies hurrying to and fro, and over it all the low murmur of men's voices. was curious how quiet those hundreds of soldiers were. No voice was ever unduly raised. They might have been in

their own homes.

It

And it was a cosmopolitan crowd, so many nationalities being enrolled under the banner of the Maple Leaf.

Here was a darky from the West Indies, very shiny and nicely blacked. A Jap or two sat at the next table. There were a handful of half-breeds further along, and several quiet-eyed Red Indians, whose khaki caps seemed a poor substitute for their native feathers. There was a Mohammedan from Syria, and a brace of coons from the states. There was a handsome Greek from the Archipelago, and a Czecho-Slovak (from Winnipeg). There were Russians, who laughed when their English proved inadequate, and clear-eyed Danes, whose forbears sailed the seas when Vikings commanded the galleys. There were Swedes and Roumanians and swarthy Italians. There was a Spaniard from Spain and an other from the Argentine, and French

men from France, who consorted but ill with their French-Canadian second cousins.

Close to the counter there stood a fierce-looking Sicilian brigand, who, just then, was explaining to the padre about the altercation he had had with a Britisher, and how the devil was urging him to kill the Britisher; and in his endeavor to ward off the wiles of the Evil One he crossed himself continually. And lo! while he was making the sign for the tenth time, the Britisher had knocked him down.

The brigand even now was indignant; but whether his indignation was inspired by the crass British ignorance which failed to grasp the lofty motive for his passivity, or whether he resented the scurvy trick that Heaven had played him, I do not know. Anyway, he had a black eye, and he spoke excitedly, flinging all his fingers in the air.

Apart from these, there were Americans by the score, men from North and South: some who wanted you to know that they were Yankees, others who blazed if you thought they were.

And in addition to these types there were Britishers from every nook and corner of the four kingdoms.

Lastly came the Canadians proper, men from East and West, genuine sons of Our Lady of the Snows. Of these there were trappers from the Hudson River territory, and men of the Northwest Police. There were lumberjacks from Labrador way, and daredevils from the western camps. There were diggers from Alaska and the Yukon; and backwoodsmen from New Brunswick. There were ice peddlers from the city and cow-punchers from the ranch. There were business men, C.P.R. chefs, medical students, university professors, philanthropists, actors, lawyers, ministers of religion, and I know not who else men of all creeds and VOL. 17-NO. 889

classes and nationalities and together they stood shoulder to shoulder in the ranks of the Canadian Army.

And it was these men, each either sick or wounded, who frequented the K. of C. hut and made it what it was - a work of absorbing human interest: a place of laughter and tears.

The Tablet

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND HIS SPOOKS

BY E. T. RAYMOND

It is related of Congreve that in his later years he affected a disdain for his own works, and expressed annoyance when they were praised. Voltaire, visiting England, began in his innocence to congratulate the old dandy on being the only English comedy writer who could touch the skirts of Molière. Congreve replied that The Way of the World and Love for Love were only the diversions of an idle. youth, and begged his visitor to think of him only as a private gentleman. The retort was prompt. 'I could have met a gentleman,' said Voltaire, 'without leaving France.'

This precise form of foppery is no longer met with, but many clever men are still afflicted with the weakness of which it was one manifestation. They are contemptuous of their strong sides, and ludicrously proud of qualities which, at the best, they share with a crowd. Born songsters pride themselves on their economics; good romancers talk bad politics; popular preachers slop about in the morasses of Higher Criticism; men with illimitable fairy tales in them argue on Socialism or the price of coal; budding Romneys deviate into all the various lunacies which end in 'ism'- and (one hopes) in bankruptcy.

But perhaps the most remarkable

case is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A genuine craftsman, having found his precise medium, having achieved a success as complete as it was deserved, finds no happiness therein, thinks contemptuously of the happiness his art has brought to others, and turns with a sense of vocation to it is difficult politely to specify what. He is not, of course, to be blamed for refusing to repeat himself to his life's end, like Nat Gould and others. He is said to have become so weary of Sherlock Holmes that he murdered the great detective with glee and resurrected him with extreme repugnance. All that is understandable; some tinge of the same feeling may have affected the most admiring reader. Toujours perdrix must be as monotonous for the cook as for the diner. But it is curious that an artist so considerable in the one special line never managed to strike out another fitting his peculiar gift.

Sir Arthur's incursions into historical romance cannot be called very successful. His Micah Clark is really a very bad kind of prig, D'Artagnan with a snuffle; The White Company is far from good company; Brigadier Gerard is too patently an Englishman who shrugs his shoulders and says 'Parly-voo!' Nor can it be honestly said that Sir Arthur shines as historian or controversialist; for neither part has he the temper nor the judgment. He is, indeed, a rather singular example of the very limited man impatient of his limits, and always wanting, like his own Dr. Watson, to be trying another person's job. Dr. Watson was not a shining success, but his patients did not seem to complain, as Sir Arthur's readers must sometimes do.

What can now be the feelings of those readers over the latest vagaries of their old favorite? One can imagine the devout Doylist wringing his hands over every fresh appearance of

Sir Arthur in the character of an exponent of spiritualism. For Sir Arthur the spiritualist makes cruel war on the great legend of the perfect detective. The peculiar charm of Sherlock Holmes is common sense penetrated with glamour; it is the romance of the ultraprosaic. If Watson were a shade less commonplace, if the criminals were only a trifle more out-of-the-way, if the Anglo-Indian in The Sign of Four lived in a house less hideously real than the yellow-bricked villa at Brixton, the spell would cease to act. As things are, we are constantly hovering on the verge of skepticism and anti-climax when the requisite touch of natural stupidity or commonness assures us that it is all real, that we are veritably there in the frowsy suburban garden or the dusty attic, watching with Watson's own bewilderment the seeming irrelevances of the great consulting detective, or sharing his prejudice against the perky cocksureness of the regular man from Scotland Yard. Sherlock Holmes would be incredible if he ever deviated by a hair's-breadth from his line of inference from observation, if coincidence ever came to his help, if (in short) he were not always merely the personification of common sense, while Watson, his foil, is the personification of common stupidity.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his new character, is the exact opposite of his creation. Instead of common sense penetrated with glamour, we have here the wildest mysticism tamed down and vulgarized by a dreadful ordinariness. In the detective stories we do feel with a shudder that No. 10 Endymion Terrace, with its smug suburban front and its bow-window with an india rubber plant in a ten-and-sixpenny vase, is authentically one with Tophet; in the spiritualistic expositions we are made to feel that Paradise is very like, say, the Hampstead Garden Suburb, full

of civilization, as far back as we can see it. Each form of society, each form of art, recurs in the same order in each successive civilization. Yet there is progress; for every age is on a higher plane of knowledge and ability to use Nature than was the previous age. When we have just been living through a lifetime of changes in two or three years, it is well to give an eye to the general pattern of human affairs.

The difficulties and changes of the Roman age were much the same as ours; we can see how they met these conditions, where they succeeded and where they failed. The same methods will not necessarily spell success or failure for us; but the various pitfalls are at least a warning to us to guard against similar mistakes. The Roman management of the Western World was a great success for training of the nations, though at a great cost of suppression and hardship. How did democracy manage it? That may light up our questions. Within a century of plebeian control the series of dictators arose, the only effective instrument for dealing with large questions in conformity with democratic opinion. That dictatorship passed into army control, and as the army became internationalized, it passed into international control of the whole group.

So long as the mass of administrative families were kept in unison with this, during the first two centuries after Christ, the system worked fairly well, the civilized world was widely prosperous and happy. When the army broke away and ignored the civil population, it set up and cut down its 'barrack-emperors' as it listed, every few years. General disruption and misery followed. This was only overcome by starting again a strong civilian control by a bureaucracy under Diocletian, which gave another century of wellbeing to the West, and kept the East

ern Empire afloat for a thousand years. We see that 'direct action' by force was a failure, and linked action by consent of a permanent body of trained administrators was the essential to democratic success.

Next see where the Roman development entirely failed. Its demand for public maintenance steadily grew, and it was met by eating up the capital values of the tributary provinces, and finally the capital values of Rome itself. The Mediterranean was ruined by slave hunting, by taxation, by corn tribute. Doles incessantly increased and ruined the moralities of work. Every worker had to belong to a tradeunion, and the government used the unions to do cheap work for the poor, and be paid for it by overcharging the well-to-do. The end was social slavery and economic ruin.

Here we may see the insight which history gives us on these problems, repeated in our own age. A still longer view into earlier civilizations- even though imperfect- has its use in showing us what always recurs, and is, therefore, inherent in man's nature, and what is merely a casual effect and not constant. We want now to get back to as clear a view of the natural history of man as may be possible after the long ages that have passed. We need to build up a picture of the past in as much social detail as we can if we would understand the present and forecast future changes.

In our present difficulty, let us see what the Egyptian city man was formerly. In the third century, 'It is a familiar thing with the people of Egypt to break out, like madmen, into the violentest seditions and disorders, upon the slightest occasions. Often have they for a matter of a compliment neglected, or for a place in the baths, or about the flesh in their markets, herbs, shoes, and the like, raised such