A Volunteer Poilu

"How did it happen?"

"Went through my pockets, I imagine."

"Oh, no, I meant how did he get killed?" "Stray shell sailed in as we were going through a village, and caught him and two of the other boys."

"You must not make your friend talk too much," mumbled an old Sister of Charity rather crossly.

The two young men with the same identical oddity of gait were salesmen of artificial legs, each one a wearer and demonstrator of his wares. The first, from Ohio, had lost his leg in a railroad accident two years before, and the second, a Virginian with a strong accent, had been done for in a motor-car smashup. One morning the man from Ohio gave us a kind of danse macabre on the deck; rolling his trouser leg high above his artificial shin, he walked, leaped, danced, and ran. "Can you beat that?" he asked with pardonable pride. "Think what these will mean to the soldiers." Meanwhile, with slow care, the Virginian explained the ingenious mechanism.

Strange tatters