Bang!
It was very soon over with that poor bear; he never even changed the position into which he had thrown himself, but lay there dead, with his great head on his paws like a gigantic dog asleep.
Chapter Thirty One.
A Council—Preparing for Winter Quarters—The Isle of Alba and its Mammoth Caves—Magnus’s Tale—At his Boy’s Grave.
The word “canny” is often applied to Scotchmen in a somewhat disparaging sense by those who do not know the meaning of the word, nor the true character of the people on whom they choose to fix the epithet. The word is derived from “can,” signifying knowledge, ability, skill, etc, and probably a corruption of the Gaelic “caen” (head). The Scotch are pre-eminently a thinking nation, and, as a rule, they are individually skilful in their undertakings; they like to look before they leap, they like to know what they have to do before they begin, but having begun, they work or fight with all their life and power. It was “canniness” that won for Robert Bruce the Battle of Bannockburn, it was the canniness of Prince Charles Stuart that enabled him to defeat Sir John Cope at the Battle of Dunbar. There is no nation in the world possesses more “can” than the Scotch, although they are pretty well matched by the Germans. Prince Bismarck is the canniest man of the century.
”À Berlin! À Berlin!” was the somewhat childish cry of the volatile Gaul, when war broke out betwixt his sturdy neighbour and him.
Yes, fair France, go to Berlin if you choose, only first and foremost you have to overthrow—what? Oh! only one man. A very old one, too. Yonder he is, in that tent in the corner of a field, seated at a table, quietly solving, one would almost think, a chess problem. And so it is, but he is playing the game with living men, and every move he makes is carefully studied. That old man in the tent, to which the wires converge from the field of battle, is General von Moltke, the best soldier that the world has ever known since the days of Bonaparte and Wellington, and the canniest.
But the word “canny” never implies over-frugality or meanness, and I believe my readers will go a long way through the world, without meeting a Scotchman who would not gladly share the last sixpence he had in the world to benefit a friend.