like a man free to rub his skin with his hand and a
mortal disease in his blood. Are you ready? How anticipate a hostile
march on the capital, is our business.'

Striding up and down the library, Lord Ormont dropped his wrath to
dictate the practical measures for defence--detesting the cat's-cry
'defence,' he said; but the foe would bring his old growlers, and we
should have to season our handful of regulars and mob of levies, turn the
mass into troops. With plenty of food, and blows daily, Englishmen soon
get stomachs for the right way to play the game; bowl as well as bat; and
the sooner they give up the idea of shamming sturdy on a stiff hind leg,
the better for their chances. Only, it's a beastly thing to see that for
their favourite attitude;--like some dog of a fellow weak in the fists,
weaker in the midriff, at a fair, who cries, Come on, and prays his gods
you won't. All for peace, the rascal boasts himself, and he beats his
wife and kicks his curs at home. Is there any one to help him now, he
vomits gold and honours on the man he yesterday treated as a felon. Ha!

Bull the bumpkin disposed of, my lord drew leisurely back from the
foeman's landing-place, at the head of a body of serious Englishmen;
teaching them to be manageable as chess-pieces, ready as bow-strings to
let fly. Weyburn rejoiced to find himself transcribing crisp sentences,
hard on the matter, without garnish of scorn. Kent, Sussex, Surrey, all
the southern heights about London, round away to the south-western of the
Hampshire heathland, were accurately mapped in the old warrior's brain.
He knew his points of vantage by name; there were no references to
gazetteer or atlas. A chain of forts and earthworks enables us to choose
our ground, not for clinging to them, but for choice of time and place to
give battle. If we have not been playing double-dyed traitor to
ourselves, we have a preponderating field artillery; our yeomanry and
volunteer horsemen are becoming a serviceable cavalry arm; our infantry
prove that their heterogeneous composition can be welded to a handy mass,
and can stand fire and return it, and not be beaten by an acknowledged
defeat.

'That's English! yes, that's English! when they're at it,' my lord sang
out.

'To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end,' cried Weyburn; his
former enthusiasm for the hero mounting, enlightened by a reminiscence of
the precept he had hammered on the boys at Cuper's.

'They fall well.