“Well, we fight for the country—but she loves the soldiers as though they were not the country’s but her own flesh and blood, and comes to see ’em in the hospital like a mother, and talks to ’em the same as I do to you, and comforts ’em, and prays for ’em, and acts like the real mother of her people—that’s why I’d die for her, and not because she’s the Queen of England only.”
“Bravo!” said Joe. “Hope I shall soon see her in th’ ’orsepittal. It be out ’ere: beant it St. Thomas’s.”
“I hope you won’t, my brave lad,” said the sergeant; “but don’t tell me about republicanism when we’ve got such a good Queen; it’s a shame and a disgrace to mention it.”
“So it be,” said Joe; “I’m darned if I wouldn’t knock a feller into the middle o’ next week as talked like thic. Hooroar for the Queen!”
“And now I’m going to say another thing,” continued the sergeant, who really waxed warm with his subject, and struck admiration into his audience by his manner of delivery: may I say that to my mind he was even eloquent, and ought to have been a sergeant-at-law, only that the country would have been the loser by it: and the country, to my mind, has the first right to the services of every citizen. “Just look,” said the sergeant, “at the kindness of that—what shall I call her? blessed!—yes, blessed Princess of Wales! Was there ever such a woman? Talk about Jael in the Bible being blessed above women—why I don’t set no value upon her; she put a spike through a feller it’s true, but it was precious cowardly; but the Princess, she goes here and goes there visiting the sick and poor and homeless, not like a princess, but like a real woman, and that’s why the people love her. No man despises a toady more than I do—I’d give him up to the tender mercies of that wife of Heber the Keenite any day; but if the Princess was to say to me, ‘Look ’ere, Sergeant, I feel a little low, and should like some nice little excitement just to keep up my spirits and cheer me up a bit’” (several of them thought this style of conversation was a familiar habit with the Princess and Sergeant Goodtale, and that he
must be immensely popular with the Royal Family), “well, if she was to say, ‘Look here, Sergeant Goodtale, here’s a precipice, it ud do me good to see you leap off that,’ I should just take off my coat and tuck up my shirt sleeves, and away I should go.”
At such unheard of heroism and loyalty there was a general exclamation of enthusiasm, and no one in that company could tell whom he at that moment most admired, the Princess or the Sergeant.
“That’s a stunner!” said Joe.
“Princess by name and Princess by nature,” replied the sergeant; “and now look’ee here, in proof of what I say, I’m going to give you a toast.”
“Hear, hear,” said everybody.