, and wondered that any man should be proud of such a freakish conception of a country house. They were abandoned during the war, except one or two used for casual rendezvous between French officers and their light o’ loves, and the towpath was used only by stray couples who came out for loneliness, and British soldiers walking out with French girls. The market-gardeners punted down the river in long, shallow boats, like gondolas, laden high with cabbages, cauliflowers, and asparagus, and farther upstream there was a boathouse where orderlies from the New Zealand hospital in Amiens used to get skiffs for an hour’s rowing, leaning on their oars to look at the picture of the cathedral rising like a mirage beyond the willows and the encircling water, with fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, or lurid storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of distant gunfire, rising sometimes to a fury of drumming when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside Roye and the lines beyond Suzanne. It was what the French call la rafale des tambours de la mort