made the walls and windows so horrid with dead and dying insects.

"Yes; the squashy ones were rather streaky!" had been the words in which Hugh John admitted his guilt, after the pole and leathern flapper were taken from him and burned in the washhouse fire.

Thus in the semi-darkness Hugh John lay watching the flies with the stealthy intentness of a Red Indian scalper on the trail. It was sad to lie idly in bed, so bewrapped and swathed that (as he mournfully remarked), "if one of the brutes were to settle on your nose, you could only wait for him to crawl up, and then snatch at him with your left eyelid."

Suddenly the disabled hero bethought himself of something. First, after listening intently so as to be quite sure that "the children" were outside the bounds of the house, the wounded general raised himself on his elbow. But the effort hurt him so much that involuntarily he said "Outch!" and sank back again on the pillow.

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"Crikey, but don't I smell just!" he muttered, when, after one breath of purer air, he sank back into the pool of arnica vapour. "I suppose I'll have to howl out for Janet. What a swot!"

"Janet!—Ja-a-a-a-net!" he shouted, and sighed a sigh of relief to find that at least there was one part of him neither bandaged nor drowned in arnica.

"Deil tak' the laddie!" cried Janet, who went about her work all day with one ear cocked toward the chamber of her brave sick soldier; "what service is there in taking the rigging aff the hoose wi' your noise? Did ye think I was doon at Edam Cross? What do ye want, callant, that ye deafen my auld lugs like that? I never heard sic a laddie!"

But General Smith did not answer any of these questions. He well knew Janet's tone of simulated anger when she was "putting it on."

"Go and fetch it!" he said darkly.

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CHAPTER VIII

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