"What is it, Keith," asked the mother, recognizing the symptoms.
"I want some money," he whispered into her ear.
"Go and ask papa."
"No, you ask him."
That was what always happened, and in the end the mother voiced the boy's plea to the father, who just then appeared in the door to the living-room. He was in a good humour and promptly reached into his pocket. Unfortunately Keith discovered at that crucial moment that one of his shoe laces had become untied.
"Please, mamma, help me," he said, putting his foot on a chair to enable her to reach it more easily.
"That settles it," exclaimed the father with a darkening face as he handed Keith a few small copper coins. "That is all you will get now. A boy of five who makes his mother tie his shoe strings ought not to have anything at all."
Keith took the coins silently and went with Lena to the fair, but he saw nothing worth seeing, and he never wanted to go again. Uneasily he prowled among the booths trying as a matter of duty to find something so cheap that his scant hoard would buy it. At last he succeeded in getting a little box of tin soldiers of poorest quality for one-third less than the price put on it It was one of the few times in his life when he found himself able to haggle over the cost of a thing.
From the first he found fault with the new addition to his army, and one day not long afterwards he charged the whole regiment with cowardice in the face of the enemy. A drumhead court martial was held on the spot, and the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The culprits were found guilty in a body and sentenced to immediate execution. Then Keith possessed himself surreptitiously of the family hammer, and when his mother came to investigate the noise he was making the whole offensive regiment had been reduced to scraps. Never before or after did Keith as a general go to such extremes on behalf of military morale.
But many, many years later, when he stopped for the first time at a typical English hotel, he found himself horribly embarrassed by the assistance forced on him by the obligatory valet.