st air of impromptu, took
Colonel Taubmann so fairly aback that he found himself stammering thanks
before he well knew what had happened: and from that moment he was at the
town's mercy. Before he could drop back in the chaise, and almost before
the Mayor, casting off his robe and throwing it upon the arm of the
town-crier, had exchanged his civic for his military role, the horses were
unharnessed and a dozen able-bodied men tugging at the traces: and so,
desperately gripping a stout bunch of scarlet geraniums, Colonel Taubmann
was rattled off amid a whirl of cheering through the narrow streets, over
the cobbles, beneath arches and strings of flags and flag-bedecked
windows, from which the women leaned and showered rice upon him, with a
band playing ahead and a rabble shouting astern, up the hill to the
battery, where willing hands had wreathed Looe's four eighteen-pounders
with trusses of laurel. The very mark moored off for a target had been
decorated with an enormous bunch of holly and a motto--decipherable, as
Captain Pond, offering his field-glass, pointed out--

_Our compliments to Bonyparty:
He'll find us well and likewise hearty!_

The moment for resistance, for effective protest, had passed. There was
really nothing for the Colonel to do but accept the situation with the
best face he could muster. As the chaise drew up alongside the battery,
he did indeed cast one wild look around and behind him, but only to catch
a bewitching smile from the Mayoress--a young and extremely good-looking
woman, with that soft brilliance of complexion which sometimes marks the
early days of motherhood. And Captain Pond, with the Doctor and Second
Lieutenant Clogg at his elbow, was standing hat in hand by the
carriage-step; and the weather was perfect, and every face in the crowd
and along the line of the Die-hards so unaffectedly happy, that--to be
brief--the Colonel lost his head for the moment and walked through the
inspection as in a dream, accepting--or at least seeming to accept--it in
the genial holiday spirit in which it was so honestly presented.
Bang-Bang! went the eighteen-pounders, and through the smoke Colonel
Taubmann saw the pretty Mayoress put up both hands to her ears.

"Damme!" said Gunner Spettigew that evening, "the practice, if a man can
speak professionally, was a disgrace. Oke, there, at Number Two gun, must
ha' lost his head altogether; for I marked the shot strike the water, and
'twas a goo