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down waiting ready to spring. The footsteps came nearer and nearer. Tom could feel his heart thumping against his ribs. Suddenly appeared round the corner of the passage, Tom was on his in a minute and taken by surprise Smith was flung senseless to the ground. Tom was just getting up when he saw a piece of old parchment, he opened it and this is what he read—“I, Wilfred James have stolen these articles of great price from Queen Elizabeth. I could not keep the secret so I put my confidence in Sir Walter Raleigh who gave a hint about it to the great statesman Bacon, who told Queen Elizabeth. The troops of soldiers will be here in one hour and if they find the jewels I shall be locked in the Tower.” There the paper ended, so Tom began to look for the jewels, and found them in Smith’s pocket. Then putting Smith back on his bed he went to his father’s study and told Sir Alfred all the paper had said, and showed him the jewels.

The next day Sir Alfred gave Smith the “sack” and the day after he was found to be the worst thief that ever puzzled Scotland Yard and was arrested and sent to Dartmoor convict prison.

THE END

FRAGMENT OF

A NOVEL

To myself,

Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

to whose sympathy and

appreciation alone it owes its being,

this book is dedicated.

Dedicatory letter,

My dear Evelyn,

Much has been written and spoken about the lot of the boy with literary aspirations in a philistine family; little can adequately convey his difficulties, when the surroundings, which he has known from childhood, have been entirely literary. It is a sign of victory over these difficulties that this book is chiefly, if at all, worthy of attention.

Many of your relatives and most of your father’s friends are more or less directly interested in paper and print. Ever since you first left the nursery for meals with your parents downstairs, the conversation, to which you were an insatiable listener, has been of books, their writers and producers; ever since, as a sleepy but triumphantly emancipate school-boy, you were allowed to sit up with our elders in the “bookroom” after dinner, you have heard little but discussion about books. Your home has always been full of them; all new books of any merit, and most of none, seem by one way or another to find their place in the files which have long overflowed the shelves. Among books your whole life has been layed and you are now rising up in your turn to add one more to the everlasting bonfire of the ephemeral.

And all this will be brought up against you. “Another of these precocious Waughs,” they will say, “one more nursery novel.” So be it. There is always a certain romance, to the author at least, about a first novel which no reviewer can quite shatter. Good luck! You have still high hopes and big ambitions and have not yet been crushed in the mill of professionalism. Soon perhaps you will join the “wordsmiths” jostling one another for royalties and contracts, meanwhile you are still very young.

Yourself,

Evelyn

I

Peter Audley awoke with “second bell” ringing dismally down the cloisters and rolling over in bed looked at his watch. Reassured that he had another five minutes before he need begin getting up, he pulled his rug up over his shoulders and lay back gazing contentedly down the dormitory, which was already stirring with the profoundly comforting sounds made by other people dressing. The splashing of the showers next door, the chipping of the thick crockery and the muttered oaths at backstuds accentuated the pleasure of the last minutes.

Early school was kept up practically all the year round at Selchurch, which took a certain pride in the gloom of these early mornings. Peter, however, had got his “privileges” which took away the bitterest sting of frantic punctuality and allowed him, after reporting to his form master, to sit out and work in his study.

With a heave he got out of bed and went to wash. The showers looked singularly uninviting but the water for the basins was stone cold—the furnaces were not lit until midday in March 1918—and with