Old Spurs of Mine.

Adieu, old spurs of mine. Tried friends, we must part. The hon-our with which you have gilded my oft-wearied nether limbs is to change for another that's of those whose spurs of soul are the twin watch words, the liberties of civilisation and "They shall not pass."

I shall put you aside. You will take it as a matter of course; for you were ever ready at the call of duty and gentle in its execution. You are Light Horse spurs of the Anzac variety, and none of your family has ever had any considerable acquaintance who did anything less than go where they were put and stick there through thick and thin so long as the twin reaches of body and soul were twain and firm-buckled, the vital band conjoining head to heart.

I shall put you aside, but you will take it quite casually; for all the folk of your people's acquaintance ever did expect to-morrow to be better than to-day. They live on the conviction that no sacrifice is ever in vain, that no nut is hard to crack but it has a kernel worth getting, and that they're the ones to get it. I must lay you aside. But this time you must know that taking you off means a wrench that strains to the heart. For, though I choose it, I can but put you aside with wistful regret at parting from the sturdy souls that have conquered heat and cold, hunger and thirst, and unrelieved exile from all the benign influences of life, while they rode by night to fight by day; or lay parched and dust-garmented beneath a pitiless sun; or recon-noitred for the hidden forward-flung foe; or hectored his successive rearguards and deadly machine guns, till his army was a scattered rout. Ye Gods! It were irony indeed to postyou to some person in Australia, old, ill-furbished spurs. You might yet find wearers among a section whose name we have garlanded with honour, while they, ignorant alike of what military obedience and corps economy are, patronised us with parcels.

I wonder do they yet know that these men who proved Australians, men who did their part in maiming Turkey in her bone and sinew, and subserviently bled her to death between Romani and the Ajuah, have ever been like well-bred sleuth hounds straining at the leash to get upon the track of the Hun. Go now, and tell them that by Mussalabeh we met his best, and beat them, man to man. You go. But with you cannot go too, the memories that arise of what this lustrous elite from the Rising Sun have been and affected. What they did in Gallipoli before the admiring eyes of a new regenerate earth, that they have done, without ebb of soul, in the silence of Sinai, in the dust of Daroun, in the land that was desolate, on the precipitous paths of Judah's cheerless desert, and in the wintry drench of Moab.

Good-bye, old spurs. Not yours to take a place in the war museum that they are making, not with hands alone, and not alone with laurelled trophies taken from the enemy. For you and I have our betters, who saw us come and pass. Yet you, in your arms, could not contain in sil-ver type the names that their endurance and valour have graven in gold and diaper on the yet opening tablets of Australia's story-those names only that we have known. Nor the

time-table of to-day, nor the books of the new era of Peace, nor the guides that haply will lead pilgrims along the track of battles won, shall tell one half their number. But this tell those who would discover them: They lie far out along the paths where few men care to go, on paths where none but the Bedouin went before, and off all paths, in secret places, where the hunted gazelle was wont to find refuge, but the world's outlaws could keep none. They lie out even beyond the long trail of white crosses that spreads its arms to East and West, in places whence the foeman fled at gesture of Imperial strategy, or where the star of victory shone refulgent on us, but claim-ed no toll of life. They are registered only in many manly hearts whose record brooks no challenge. And. this you can Say of them, these men of mine, defeat, even in the day of defeat, was a thing they were not destined to experience. In the day when they were bidden to retire their part was done. Vigilant sentinels of the ever-

A Glimpse of Jericho.

lasting Sphinx, victorious guards of the Empire's great vivifying canal, vanguard and flankguard of the Holy City's liberation, meet merciful redresses of centuries of wrong, to you, with these my spurs, adieu!

Soul is not cribbed and confined to matter, and mine, with yours, goes on, as thus, for ours have gone across the weary stretches of sand and lime terrace and loam. In the day of your dreams may those of us who have found favour less with fortune have found it full with God. In that day when the exultant living and the remembered dead join in the pageant of the returning brave, to thrill the heart of our Sou-thern Queen and call to her face proud smiles and happy tears; in that day, proud should I be to take again these spurs of mine and share your welcome home.

Egypt. P.D.C F.