He recalled having read of an order, issued at the time of the Mexican War, that the collars of all officers in the United States Army should rise to the tips of the ears. It was scarcely surprising, he thought, that the Seminoles—clad virtually in nothing at all—should have been able to stalemate an army thus uniformed in the steaming swamps of Florida.

"They're great, aren't they?"

The voice came from a lower level, and the General looked down to meet the excited blue eyes of a curly-haired male moppet who could scarcely have been more than twelve. There was an aura of friendliness about the leather-jacketed-and-corduroyed youngster, a sharing of manifest interest, that pierced the hide of the old soldier.

He smiled back and said, "Quite wonderful," and was briefly afraid his words had been too condescending. But the quick answering smile on the youngster's face revealed that he had said the right thing.

He followed the lad's rapt gaze to a shelf he had not yet studied. The name on its cardboard label read MacReedy and as soon as he saw the tiny figures it supported, his interest became focused upon it to the exclusion of all other shelves and their fascinating displays.

MacReedy was very evidently a specialist. His subject was American soldiery, with its chief emphasis on artillery—from early Colonial times to the present. As one of the highest-ranking officers in the Ordnance Department of the United States Army, the General's critical interest was aroused.

Here were the demi-culverins of the Manhattan Dutch, the brass field-pieces and mortars of the French wars and the Revolution, the light horse artillery cannon of the Mexican and Civil Wars, along with pear-shaped Dahlgren and Parrot siege-guns, each piece with its crew of aimers, loaders, rammers and ammunition bearers.

Here were the crowbar-like dynamite guns that protected New York and Boston and Baltimore against threatened British invasion during the Newfoundland fisheries disputes, back in the 1880's; and the complex disappearing cannon that followed them. Here was the old standard three-inch fieldpiece on which the General had cut his own eyeteeth; here the French 75 and 155, long and short, and the mammoth railway guns of World War One. Here was even a model of the postwar American 75—the ill-fated cannon that had proved so accurate on the firing-range, and so utterly useless after a half-mile over a bumpy road.

Here were the weapons of World War Two, from M-7 105 self-propelled howitzer to the 240-millimetre tractor-borne cannon. And here were more recent weapons, the 120-millimetre radar-aimed anti-aircraft cannon; its newer automatic 75-millimetre cousin; the new 90-millimetre turret-mount for the Walker Bulldog, the 105-gpf in the turret of its new heavy tank.