Every November, just as I am beginning to look sadly down the long vista
of apple--apple-tart, apple-pudding, stewed apple and custard,
apple-charlotte and apple-dumpling--that stretches all the way from now
to rhubarb, come cranberries.
I had forgotten them, as I do every year, and the pinky-red that tinged
the knife yesterday, as soon as it entered what I feared was an
apple-tart, ran right up my arm and spread in a glow to my face. _Dear_
cranberries!
And doubly dear just now. How _did_ you manage it? All the way from
Archangel, was it--threading your way through mines and submarines, and
not a keg broken, not a cranberry exploded? Thank you, JELLICOE.
Or are you a Southern Slav, a Crim-Tartar? And did you dare the
Dardanelles, give the _Goeben_ the slip, and disappoint the German
ganders of their sauce? Artful ally!
Where is your home, bright berry? What are your habits? Do you push
through the snow on the steppes? Do you flower in the first thaw of
spring, set in full summer and ripen when the snow falls again? I think
so; you have the savour of snow. I hope so; I picture the snowfields
stained with your blood when you burst.
We've known too little of you, but we shall want to know more now. The
Vicar _said_ the war would do good in more ways than one. _It does it
now_; it sets me thinking.
Learning, too. My landlady, for whom I had composed a simple
object-lesson on the value of a strong Navy, pricked all my bubbles
with, "Russian, Sir? Did you say Russian? I wouldn't have a bit o'
foreign fruit in the house. Them berries was picked in my sister's
garden on the moors."
"Helmets galore strew the fields. Rifles, motor lorries, and field
kitchens are common finds. Some day they will be collected,
and--such is the scandalous heartlessness of mankind--distributed as
souvenirs of the great Armageddon of 1914."--_Daily Chronicle._
In case anybody wishes to bring us home a souvenir, we are keeping a
little place on our writing-desk for a field-kitchen.
* * * * *
Illustration: _Vicar_ (_his mind full of the recruiting posters_).
"WILT THOU TAKE THIS WOMAN TO THY WEDDED WIFE--FOR THREE YEARS OR THE
DURATION OF THE WAR?"
* * * * *