“Used to be a soldier man,” he replied.
“Why ever didn’t you stay in the army, and become a Field Marshal?”
“By Jove!” he cried, “that would have been a rattling good idea. Wonder I didn’t think of it at the time.”
“Is it too late now?”
“Surely not,” he answered promptly, “for such an exceptionally fortunate person as I am. Anyway, so far as 1815 is concerned, Blucher, you see, had Grouchy to compete with—this double-six is Grouchy, with thirty-five thousand men—but Blucher outmarched him, came up, and—” He swept the rest of his blue men down with a wave of the hand, and hummed “Rule, Britannia.”
I expressed a wish that he had selected the reds, so that he might have won; but he remarked in a change of mood that anything like success in any game would, by reason of its novelty, have given him serious alarm. I asked how the time was going.
“Lent my watch to a relative,” he mentioned. “A rather distant relative; but I see a good deal of him, from the waist upwards.”
And he went to the mantelpiece to inspect the clock.
“Little man,” in a sharp voice, “who is this?”
“That? Oh, that’s dear mother.”