“So you are a greater man than your tailor, now?”
“O yes,” said Moodie, “I take precedence of all manner of people, and moreover wear, whenever I please—which is not very often, you may be sure,—a concern in my button-hole, something like what I used to wear when I was Noble Grand of the Julius Cæsar Lodge of Oddfellows, at South Marden. You may depend upon it I am something very great indeed, though I must admit I do not know exactly what.”
“Very great indeed!” said Birger, who, as may be supposed, did not feel his country particularly flattered by Moodie’s absurd—not to say ungrateful—description of his honours, and retorted with a bit of Swedish slang: “I am sure you are something ending in ‘ral,’ as the Karing’s wife said to her husband; it certainly is not admiral—perhaps it is corporal?”
“Upon my word, Birger, I beg your pardon,” said Moodie, in some confusion. “You speak English so perfectly, and look so like an Englishman, that I forgot we are not all countrymen together.”
“Well, well,” said Birger, good humouredly, “I must confess there is a great deal too much of truth in your satire, and that is what makes the sting of it.”
“Never mind him, Birger,” said the Parson; “you Swedes are uncommon fine fellows, and carry your honours in your history; I should like to know what Europe would have done in the thirty years war, if it had not been for Gustaf Adolph and Oxenstjerna? Why, it was you who thrashed Czar Peter and all the Russias into something like civilization, and were the making of his armies by licking them. Gallantly, too, did you hold your own, under the other Gustaf, against the giant you had made; and I have no doubt but that you would have thrashed the French giant Nap., as well as the Russian giant Peter, if you had only made up your minds in time which side you meant to fight on. But for all that, it is a fact, as Moodie says, that, like the girls, you are a little too fond of ribbons.”
“It is very true,” said Birger; “we depreciate our own honours by our over-lavish distribution of them. That which is plentiful, is cheap—that which is little, valued. It is the law of nature, and as true of stars and ribbons as it is of green peas and early potatoes.”
“To be sure it is,” said the Captain; “what regiment in our service cares a button for the distinction of ‘Royal,’ which it shares with the Royal African condemned corps? Who prizes the Waterloo medal, which places in the same category the Englishman who fought and the Belgian who ran?”
“Yes,” said Moodie, who had by this time done blushing at his blunder, “at the Congress of Vienna, Lord Castlereagh sat among the starry host of plenipotentiaries in a plain blue coat, without one solitary decoration. ‘Ma foi! c’est bien distingué,’ said good Bishop Talleyrand, who himself had a star for every oath he had broken, and whose tailor could not find room on his coat for all of them!”
“It was ‘distingué,’” said the Captain; “he belonged to a country whose citizens do their duty for their duty’s sake. That is distinction enough for any man.”