“Gay!” responded the General, “I don’t know about that. However, it is not a tragedy. But you shall see. You wish it,—so here goes!”
“Perhaps all of you here are not fond of the water,” began the General, casting a significant glance at the river which had preoccupied our thoughts.
“That depends on circumstances,” responded the captain; “water is very good, but there are times when one would rather do without it.”
“Water, mingled with too many gun-shots, and after a difficult march, might prove unhealthy,” interrupted a hoarse voice, that of the doctor. “I should not recommend it as a remedy for my cold, but the water of your story, General,—for I suppose by your commencement your history is going to be a wet one,—will perhaps do me good.”
“Good!” said the General, “here is the doctor who imagines I am going to give him a tonic. But so long as you have wished for it doctor, you must drink it. But no more interruptions:—I have already forgotten where I was.”
“General,” replied the doctor, “you have just said ‘every one here is perhaps not fond of water;’ and you were not contradicted.”
“Thanks!” said the General. “And silence in the ranks; I will recommence.”
“Every one here does not like the water I said, very well, when I was little it seems I was of that same opinion. I didn’t like water. Let us understand each other fully as to the importance which you should attach to my repugnance to this fluid, during these first years of my life. I accepted water in many ways: I loved it sugared, and even with a little orange flavor, but I hated it cold on my face in winter, and only allowed myself to be washed willingly when it was warm. I liked, too, to stand on a bridge, and watch the water flowing underneath, and by a strange contradiction, I even enjoyed going on it, in a boat—with papa. But I should have had a horrible fear to fall in the water, or have it go suddenly over my head. To be frank, I believe I should have been frightened to have it up to my ankles, otherwise than in a foot bath. But then, one is not born perfect.
“This fear of the water was the despair of my father. He, like a practical man, thought my love of boats and navigation, and my horror of all actual contact with it, were contradictory if not incompatible traits; that the liking for it on the one hand and the dislike of it on the other argued as complete an absence of logic in the brain of his little son as in his physical and moral organisms. He was right. Aunt Marie and my mother were guilty of the sugared and warm water, but my antipathy for it, otherwise than in these forms, seemed to be a fundamental part of my nature.