ts pointing a hand to the line reached, and
menacing at one farther step. Both blamed the Government, but they
divided as to the origin of governmental inefficiency; Nevil accusing the
Lords guilty of foulest sloth, Everard the Quakers of dry-rotting the
country. He passed with a shrug Nevil's puling outcry for the enemy as
well as our own poor fellows: 'At his steppes again!' And he had to be
forgiving when reports came of his nephew's turn for overdoing his duty:
'show-fighting,' as he termed it.

'Braggadocioing in deeds is only next bad to mouthing it,' he wrote very
rationally. 'Stick to your line. Don't go out of it till you are ordered
out. Remember that we want soldiers and sailors, we don't want suicides.'
He condescended to these italics, considering impressiveness to be
urgent. In his heart, notwithstanding his implacably clear judgement, he
was passably well pleased with the congratulations encompassing him on
account of his nephew's gallantry at a period of dejection in Britain:
for the winter was dreadful; every kind heart that went to bed with cold
feet felt acutely for our soldiers on the frozen heights, and thoughts of
heroes were as good as warming-pans. Heroes we would have. It happens in
war as in wit, that all the birds of wonder fly to a flaring reputation.
He that has done one wild thing must necessarily have done the other; so
Nevil found himself standing in the thick of a fame that blew rank
eulogies on him for acts he had not performed. The Earl of Romfrey
forwarded hampers and a letter of praise. 'They tell me that while you
were facing the enemy, temporarily attaching yourself to one of the
regiments--I forget which, though I have heard it named--you sprang out
under fire on an eagle clawing a hare. I like that. I hope you had the
benefit of the hare. She is our property, and I have issued an injunction
that she shall not go into the newspapers.' Everard was entirely of a
contrary opinion concerning the episode of eagle and hare, though it was
a case of a bird of prey interfering with an object of the chase. Nevil
wrote home most entreatingly and imperatively, like one wincing, begging
him to contradict that and certain other stories, and prescribing the
form of a public renunciation of his proclaimed part in them. 'The hare,'
he sent word, 'is the property of young Michell of the Rodney, and he is
the humanest and the gallantest fellow in the service. I have written to
my Lord. Pray help to r