s come, Jimmy?" said Jenny.

"You goose! Grandpapa was pretending."

THE WATERLOO VETERAN.

Is Waterloo a dead word to you? the name of a plain of battle, no
more? Or do you see, on a space of rising ground, the little
long-coated man with marble features, and unquenchable eyes that
pierce through rolling smoke to where the relics of the old Guard of
France stagger and rally and reach fiercely again up the hill of St.
Jean toward the squares, set, torn, red, re-formed, stubborn, mangled,
victorious beneath the unflinching will of him behind there,--the Iron
Duke of England?

Or is your interest in the fight literary? and do you see in a pause
of the conflict Major O'Dowd sitting on the carcass of Pyramus
refreshing himself from that case-bottle of sound brandy? George
Osborne lying yonder, all his fopperies ended, with a bullet through
his heart? Rawdon Crawley riding stolidly behind General Tufto along
the front of the shattered regiment where Captain Dobbin stands
heartsick for poor Emily?

Or maybe the struggle arranges itself in your vision around one figure
not named in history or fiction,--that of your grandfather, or his
father, or some old dead soldier of the great wars whose blood you
exult to inherit, or some grim veteran whom you saw tottering to the
roll-call beyond when the Queen was young and you were a little boy.

For me the shadows of the battle are so grouped round old John Locke
that the historians, story-tellers, and painters may never quite
persuade me that he was not the centre and real hero of the action.
The French cuirassiers in my thought-pictures charge again and again
vainly against old John; he it is who breaks the New Guard; upon the
ground that he defends the Emperor's eyes are fixed all day long. It
is John who occasionally glances at the sky with wonder if Blucher
has failed them. Upon Shaw the Lifeguardsman, and John, the Duke
plainly most relies, and the words that Wellington actually speaks
when the time comes for advance are, "Up, John, and at them!"

How fate drifted the old veteran of Waterloo into our little Canadian
Lake Erie village I never knew. Drifted him? No; he ever marched as if
under the orders of his commander. Tall, thin, white-haired,
close-shaven, and always in knee-breeches and long stockings, his was
an antique and martial figure. "Fresh white-fish" was his cry, which
he delivered as if calling all the village to fall in for drill.

So impressive w