To C. H. G. H. Who saw with me so much of what is in this book ( Killed in action in Artois, August 27th, 1918 ) These stories of travel and chance have been selected from writings published in various periodicals between January 1907 and April 1918, and are arranged in order of time.   Foreword The author of Old Junk has been called a legend. A colleague who during the later stages of the war visited the western front assured me that this was the right word by which to describe the memory left

  I. The African Coast I She is the steamship Celestine , and she is but a little lady. The barometer has fallen, and the wind has risen to hunt the rain. I do not know where Celestine is going, and, what is better, do not care. This is December and this is Algiers, and I am tired of white glare and dust. The trees have slept all day. They have hardly turned a leaf. All day the sky was without a flaw, and the summer silence outside the town, where the dry road goes between hedges of arid prickly