The War Correspondent.

There was a joyful reunion in the cottage in Auckland town in which the rover of the world's goldfields had settled his little family while he tried his luck on the Coromandel diggings. His wife scarcely needed his words to tell her that he was just as eager to take the fighting trail again as he had been to set off on the treasure-hunt. She sighed but she made no reproaches when she greeted him as lovingly as in their young wedded days. She knew that every able-bodied man must enter on military life for the duration of the war, unless he could procure a substitute. Every male over sixteen and under sixty was liable to service in the Militia if he were not already in the Volunteers.

But Von Tempsky had no intention of waiting to be drafted for the Militia. He must get into the fighting line long before the slow process of Militia duty would take him to the front, or somewhere near it, to build redoubts and escort munition carts. Next morning he went about the business of getting as close to the seat of war as he could without being hindered by officious authority. His first sagacious step towards this end was to call on the editor of the “Southern Cross.” It happened that that journal was in need of a man of some military experience who could find his way about and keep it supplied with the daily news from the front. Von Tempsky, in spite of his foreign looks and accent, impressed the editor as a man who had a good command of accurate English, and a man of forceful character and sound wisdom who could serve the paper intelligently. So without delay he found himself invested with the authority of a war-correspondent, approved —or at any rate tolerated—by the military heads, and instructed to make the army field base at Drury his headquarters.

Behold, then, our adventurer, booted, spurred, armed and equipped for a campaign, mounted on a hired horse–which, if not exactly a charger, could at any rate be described as a sturdy hack —riding lightheartedly out along the Great South Road, bound away for the Maori War. There were thousands of other adventurers crowding the road, Regulars, Volunteers, Militia, on the march along that muddy highway. The martial note of the bugle, the spiritquickening thump and rattle of drum and piping of fife, the sights and sounds of an army on the move, the march of the blue-uniformed troops (the British redcoats all changed to blue serge campaigning dress before they were despatched to the front), the scores of transport teams taking rations and munitions southward to Otahuhu, Drury and the Queen's Redoubt—all the familiar business of war set the soldier's heart dancing. He determined he could not be a non-combatant for long.

“La petite guerre once more,” he said aloud to himself. “How good! Out on the old warpath again!”

(To be continued.)