As I gazed in dumb appeal on the face of unresponsive nature, the sound of nearing wheels sent a pulse of hope through my being: increasing to rapture as I recognised in the approaching vehicle the familiar carriage of the old doctor. If ever a god emerged from a machine, it was when this heaven-sent friend, recognising us, stopped and jumped out with a cheery hail. Harold rushed up to him at once. ‘Have you been there?’ he cried. ‘Was it a jolly fight? who beat? were there many people killed?’
The doctor appeared puzzled. I briefly explained the situation.
‘I see,’ said the doctor, looking grave and twisting his face this way and that. ‘Well, the fact is, there isn’t going to be any battle to-day. It’s been put off, on account of the change in the weather. You will have due notice of the renewal of hostilities. And now you’d better jump in and I’ll drive you home. You’ve been running a fine rig! Why, you might have both been taken and shot as spies!’
This special danger had never even occurred to us. The thrill of it accentuated the cosy homelike feeling of the cushions we nestled into as we rolled homewards. The doctor beguiled the journey with blood-curdling narratives of personal adventure in the tented field, he having followed the profession of arms (so it seemed) in every quarter of the globe. Time, the destroyer of all things beautiful, subsequently revealed the baselessness of these legends; but what of that? There are higher things than truth; and we were almost reconciled, by the time we were put down at our gate, to the fact that the battle had been postponed.
THE FINDING OF THE PRINCESS
IT was the day I was promoted to a toothbrush. The girls, irrespective of age, had been thus distinguished some time before; why, we boys could never rightly understand, except that it was part and parcel of a system of studied favouritism on behalf of creatures both physically inferior and (as was shown by a fondness for tale-bearing) of weaker mental fibre to us boys. It was not that we yearned after these strange instruments in themselves. Edward, indeed, applied his to the scrubbing-out of his squirrel’s cage, and for personal use, when a superior eye was grim on him, borrowed Harold’s or mine, indifferently. But the nimbus of distinction that clung to them—that we coveted exceedingly. What more, indeed, was there to ascend to, before the remote, but still possible, razor and strop?