The Mudlarks

THE "FERTS"

When I was young, my parents sent me to a boarding school, not in any hopes of getting me educated, but because they wanted a quiet home.

At that boarding school I met one Frederick Delano Milroy, a chubby flame-coloured brat who had no claims to genius, excepting as a littérateur.

The occasion that established his reputation with the pen was a Natural History essay. We were given five sheets of foolscap, two hours and our own choice of subject. I chose the elephant, I remember, having once been kind to one through the medium of a bag of nuts.

Frederick D. Milroy headed his effort "The Fert" in large capitals, and began, "The fert is a noble animal——" He got no further, the extreme nobility of the ferret having apparently blinded him to its other characteristics.

The other day, as I was wandering about on the "line," dodging Boche crumps with more agility than grace, I met Milroy (Frederick Delane) once more.

He was standing at the entrance of a cosy little funk-hole, his boots and tunic undone, sniffing the morning nitro-glycerine. He had swollen considerably since our literary days, but was wearing his hair as red as ever, and I should have known it anywhere—on the darkest night. I dived for him and his hole, pushed him into it, and re-introduced myself. He remembered me quite well, shook my chilblains heartily, and invited me further underground for tea and talk.

It was a nice hole, cramped and damp, but very deep, and with those Boche love-tokens thudding away upstairs I felt that the nearer Australia the better. But the rats! Never before have I seen rats in such quantities; they flowed unchidden all over the dug-out, rummaged in the cupboards, played kiss-in-the-ring in the shadows, and sang and bawled behind the old oak panelling until you could barely hear yourself shout. I am fond of animals, but I do not like having to share my tea with a bald-headed rodent who gets noisy in his cups, or having a brace of high-spirited youngsters wrestle out the championship of the district on my bread-and-butter.

Freddy apologised for them; they were getting a bit above themselves, he was afraid, but they were seldom dangerous, seldom attacked one unprovoked. "Live and let live" was their motto. For all that they did get a trifle de trop sometimes; he himself had lost his temper when he awoke one morning to find a brawny rat sitting on his face combing his whiskers in mistake for his own (a pardonable error in the dark); and, determining to teach them a lesson, had bethought him of his old friend, the noble fert. He therefore sent home for two of the best.