"Four," I correct.
"Five," asserts Pringle.
"Is that all?" asks Charlie pensively. "I should have thought that it was hours from the vision I had. Vision or dream, as you may call it."
"Oh!" says Cotton, "that need not disturb you in the least. The great rapidity of dream thought has often been proved, for instance, by an experience of Lord Holland, who fell asleep when listening to his secretary reading to him, had a long dream, and yet awoke in time to hear the end of the very sentence which had lulled him to sleep and of which he remembered the beginning."
"To judge from the length of that sentence," observes Pringle, "it must have been a German book the secretary was reading."
"In my opinion," goes on Cotton, "the rapidity of dream thought depends on the kind of food one had last, on the amount of its several chemical constituents. Suppose you had some Methyl alcohol, CH3.HO...."
"Bosh!" interrupts the disrespectful Pringle, and turns to the Sergeant. "Tell us your vision."
"Well it was thus:
"We were at a certain place, which had a certain name, which for fear of the Censor I cannot call by its real denomination, but which our boys called Mince from the amount of Germans which for many days had been chopped there into mince-meat. And remember, our men had done it this time without the help of St. George and his Agincourt Bowmen. There were thousands of dead Germans lying in front of our lines, and the enemy sent up still more men and still more guns; but the men were shattered by us and the guns battered into scrap iron.