nd bears. He was
seldom seen at that hour of the day without a cutlass in his teeth (like
Dick Needham) amid the rapid explosion of copper caps. And many were the
gardeners he brought down with yellow peas shot out of his little gun.
He lived a life of the most violent action.

"Jon," said his father to his mother, under the oak tree, "is terrible.
I'm afraid he's going to turn out a sailor, or something hopeless. Do
you see any sign of his appreciating beauty?"

"Not the faintest."

"Well, thank heaven he's no turn for wheels or engines! I can bear
anything but that. But I wish he'd take more interest in Nature."

"He's imaginative, Jolyon."

"Yes, in a sanguinary way. Does he love anyone just now?"

"No; only everyone. There never was anyone born more loving or more
lovable than Jon."

"Being your boy, Irene."

At this moment little Jon, lying along a branch high above them, brought
them down with two peas; but that fragment of talk lodged, thick, in his
small gizzard. Loving, lovable, imaginative, sanguinary!

The leaves also were thick by now, and it was time for his birthday,
which, occurring every year on the twelfth of May, was always memorable
for his chosen dinner of sweetbread, mushrooms, macaroons, and ginger
beer.

Between that eighth birthday, however, and the afternoon when he stood in
the July radiance at the turning of the stairway, several important
things had happened.

"Da," worn out by washing his knees, or moved by that mysterious instinct
which forces even nurses to desert their nurslings, left the very day
after his birthday in floods of tears "to be married"--of all things--"to
a man." Little Jon, from whom it had been kept, was inconsolable for an
afternoon. It ought not to have been kept from him! Two large boxes of
soldiers and some artillery, together with The Young Buglers, which had
been among his birthday presents, cooperated with his grief in a sort of
conversion, and instead of seeking adventures in person and risking his
own life, he began to play imaginative games, in which he risked the
lives of countless tin soldiers, marbles, stones and beans. Of these
forms of "chair a canon" he made collections, and, using them
alternately, fought the Peninsular, the Seven Years, the Thirty Years,
and other wars, about which he had been reading of late in a big History
of Europe which had been his grandfather's. He altered them to suit his
genius, and fought them all ove