fell, and it started to rain like sin.

During the next three days the weather was foul-frequent rain-storms, and the visibility often down to 100 yards. It is carrying optimism too far if one expects to be found in a derelict flying- boat in the middle of the North Sea when the visibility is under a mile. I tried to cheer up at the thought that one of you submarine fellows picked up a couple of Huns under similar circumstances early in the war, but that kind of thing doesn't happen often.

"We six were not idle. There was a hole in the hull which we couldn't locate, and which caused a leak of about 100 gallons an hour-four men baled in turns to keep the water under. The starboard wingfloat crumpled and the wing itself stripped, so we had to balance the machine by keeping a man permanently on the port wing-tip. This man was constantly being ducked. Another man had to try and hold us head to sea.

is apt to loom larger than it should. There was very little chance of our two two pigeons ever arriving, but, at all events, they had our blessings and best wishes for a pleasant trip. As a matter of fact, they never did reach home, or, if they did, their messages were never delivered to the proper authorities.

"At the beginning of the third day we sent off our last bird.

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'By this time we had been drifting with the wind and tide for so long that we didn't attempt to give our latitude and longitude, but just coded the position we reckoned to have reached before we started to drift. We left it to the base, with their better facilities, to work out the best area to search in view of the existing winds and current.

"When I took the pigeon out of the box she looked a bit jaded, poor wee thing! She was as hungry and wretched as we were. She circled slowly round, and we thought to ourselves, 'There goes our last chance. If she can't do the trick, we're "for it."

She was weak, and had over fifty miles to do in bad weather.

"The coastguard read the message attached to the pigeon's leg, and telephoned it down to the Naval Base at Lowestoft.

There were so many places to which a pigeon could have flown that it seemed to be something more than mere luck which had enabled her to reach shore at all, and then to take our message to a signal-station, where alone it could be certain of receiving proper attention.

"When we had become overdue, destroyer and trawler patrols had been detailed to look for us. After two days' search the captain of the gunboat Halcyon, who was also searching, had signalled, 'No signs of missing aircraft,' and had been told to return to harbour. He replied, 'Request permission to remain at sea and continue the search.'

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Plunging about the North Sea in bad weather is dreary work, as you know, and most men would have been only too pleased to give up hunting for a thing which was almost certain to have broken up; but he had seen no wreckage, and he reasoned that a flying-boat would not sink without leaving some trace.

Well, the gunboat received permission to remain out, and before long our base signalled to him our last-known approximate position. As tides are strong in that area and the wind changed 180 degrees, the search was a long-drawn-out process, and one that will always evoke my greatest admiration for the skill and de

When we came back from leave we found the old pigeon in the mess looking down benignly at us, as much as to say, 'You wouldn't be there if it weren't for me, you crowd of amateur birds!'

We nearly lost her just after the war. Two fellows came along in a car one afternoon, and said, 'We hear you've got quite a historic pigeon here, and we've come to take it up to London for the Services Exhibition.'

"I thought to myself, 'The deuce you have!'

"However, I took them into the anteroom and gave them some tea, and then, excusing myself a moment, I nipped out and told the flight-sergeant to take the pigeon out through the window and hide her in the hangar.

"I took these two chaps

THE sempstress of the village has a tiny shop, with two meagre rooms above it. She was agog with excitement. Her son, with his wife and baby, was coming to visit her. The son duly arrived in his car. As it was too magnificent and too long to go into Sestrol's stable, garage-room was begged of Dr Guibert in the Faubourg. The wife was more elegant than the mother of Albert, a young woman of excellent education. They stayed ten days. The son is an engineer; his present state the result of a romance, as they count romance in France. It happened that the young woman, having looked over her male acquaintances, could see nobody who pleased her imagination as a husband; so, having the conviction that the moment had come to marry, she put an advertisement in the paper, couched thus:

Young woman, twenty-one years of age, well-educated, dowry 100,000 francs, would like to meet a young man profession, engineer preferred with a view to marriage.

Having read the advertisement, young Vulcan went, saw, and was conquered. His brother-in-law has installed him as manager of a factory of

electrical fittings. The couple spent the dot on the long motor-car; and here they are, summering in the sempstress's two cramped rooms.

With reference to the marriage made by advertisement (not an uncommon procedure), we must at once admit that the French view marriage at an angle very different from our own. We English lay a sentimental stress upon this mysterious factor "love," irresist ible mutual attraction, the positive and negative electrical, as it were. We suggest to our maidens that they should hold themselves aloof till this strange force approaches. We frighten them both about getting married and about not getting married. Yet it would be rash to assert that Cupid, this mysterious juxtaposer, does his work with any infallibility. How often may not the passion be aroused by a suitable conjunction of health, season, compatible male, and suggestibility. Is it not Stendhal who says hundred would fall in love if person in a he or she had not read about it? Jane Austen, whose values of humanity are sagacious, treats love as a much milder passion than we value it today, as indeed do most older writers.

that not one

So we skirmish round awaiting the great mutual attraction, love. We make tentative experiments called flirtation, in which only one side may be in earnest, until such an experiment discovers both sides to be mutually eager, from which marriage ensues as a rule. The French follow a different course. The young girl keeps herself prepared to fall in love as soon as a suitable man is provided; she is 1 in love with her husband before he exists, and has only to transfer the already existing willingness to the solid object (often a very solid object) presented to her. Yet even in France things are not quite impersonal. The young lady who put her advertisement so frankly in the paper had already canvassed the young men of her neighbourhood; she must have weighed up the advantages of a score of applicants drawn by the advertisement. No one seeing her with her husband could doubt for a moment the genuine love and happiness which she has reaped from marriage.

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bitious pianist, ill-contented to remain within her powers. She was especially the performer of a piece called "The Tempest," which moved the village to great admiration. At Jo's playing the people were amazed, with that kind of amazement which comes from a juggling trick or legerdemain. To see fingers move thus rapidly was so enthralling that they forgot to listen to the music. But ah! when Mlle. Cecile played "The Tempest." That was another affair. The thunder rumbled in the bass, the lightning jagged down the piano in discords, the wind howled in fumbled arpeggios up the treble, while the rain poured in a persistent rattle of Bb. The fact that the piece was a third beyond Mlle. Cecile's technique, that she had, it must be confessed, very little sense of rhythm, and that the piano was abominably out of tune, detracted little from the general effect. Would it not be pedantry to expect storms to be in rhythm; a few strange dissonances but added to the wildness of the interpretation ?

Up till the moment of her engagement Mlle. Cecile was a commonplace pretty girl, who dressed with a little more taste than the average in the village. She also had the charm of gaiety. From the moment of her engagement she bloomed with that curious underglow, in itself a beauty, which the birth of love causes to pulsate, like a corona, about the one who loves. She was what would be called genuinely in love.