Half an hour afterwards Dabbs, from the next street, strode up the garden path and gave a pull at the front-door bell.
“If I catch your boy playing war games within a mile of my place again,” he announced, “I’ll trounce him till his hide looks like the paint on a barber’s pole.”
“Steady, old fellow, steady,” advised Whiffles, senior. “It’s very stupid for you to throw out rash threats. What boy wouldn’t play war games nowadays, eh? Boys will be boys, you know.”
“Let him keep a boy, then,” snarled Dabbs; “it’s when he imagines himself a Prussian army corps and my greenhouse a cathedral that I draw the line.”
NO UNION HOURS
The soldier was telling the workman about a battle that he had once been in that had lasted from eight o’clock in the morning until seven o’clock at night. His description was most graphic, and he became very enthusiastic as he lived through the stirring scenes again.
“There’s one thing I can’t understand about the story,” said the workman, slowly, when he had finished. “You say that the battle began at eight o’clock in the morning and lasted until seven o’clock at night?”
“Yes, that’s so,” was the reply.
“Then,” retorted the workman, with a puzzled air, “what I can’t make out is, how did you manage about your dinner-hour?”