“Why, what is the matter?” Galt asked, holding him tighter.
“I did not know it was so beautiful, so grand!” Lionel cried. “This room alone is as large as our whole house. Ah! is that the sword your father killed men with? And will you please let me see it? Could I hold it, just once?”
“I am afraid it is too heavy for you,” Galt said, as he reached for the heavy sabre in its carved brass scabbard and took it down from a hook under his father's portrait. “It wasn't made for little hands like yours. You'd have to grow a lot before you could use it.”
Lionel stood down on the floor as the sword was put into his hands. He made a valiant effort to flourish the unwieldy blade as he thrust and lunged at an imaginary enemy. “Boom! Boom!” he cried, his eyes flashing, “Boom! t-r-r-r boom!”
“Oh, you've killed them—they are as dead as doornails!” Galt laughed, impulsively. “Now your men will have a pretty time picking all those corpses up in an ambulance.”
“Is that your father?” the boy leaned on the sabre to ask, as he looked up at the portrait of the elder Galt.
“Yes. Does he look like me?” Galt answered.
“A little bit, maybe”—the child had his wise-looking head tilted to one side as he had seen his mother stand in criticising one of her pictures—“but I don't like it much. It is full of cracks, and so—dauby.”
“'Dauby'? Where in the world could you have heard that word?”
“Oh, my mother says it often when she doesn't like one of her pictures.”