e than to Paris would any one in search of pleasure go?"
asked Bonaparte.

"I had more fun a few miles outside of Brussels," said Wellington, with a
sly wink at Washington.

"Oh, let up on that!" retorted Bonaparte. "It wasn't you beat me at
Waterloo. You couldn't have beaten me at a plain ordinary game of old-maid
with a stacked pack of cards, much less in the game of war, if you hadn't
had the elements with you."

"Tut!" snapped Wellington. "It was clear science laid you out, Boney."

"Taisey-voo!" shouted the irate Corsican. "Clear science be hanged! Wet
science was what did it. If it hadn't been for the rain, my little Duke, I
should have been in London within a week, my grenadiers would have been
camping in your Rue Peekadeely, and the Old Guard all over everywhere
else."

"You must have had a gay army, then," laughed Caesar. "What are French
soldiers made of, that they can't stand the wet--unshrunk linen or
flannel?"

"Bah!" observed Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders and walking a few paces
away. "You do not understand the French. The Frenchman is not a pell-mell
soldier like you Romans; he is the poet of arms; he does not go in for
glory at the expense of his dignity; style, form, is dearer to him than
honor, and he has no use for fighting in the wet and coming out of the
fight conspicuous as a victor with the curl out of his feathers and his
epaulets rusted with the damp. There is no glory in water. But if we had
had umbrellas and mackintoshes, as every Englishman who comes to the
Continent always has, and a bath-tub for everybody, then would your
Waterloo have been different again, and the great democracy of Europe with
a Bonaparte for emperor would have been founded for what the Americans
call the keeps; and as for your little Great Britain, ha! she would have
become the Blackwell's Island of the Greater France."

"You're almost as funny as _Punch_ isn't," drawled Wellington, with an
angry gesture at Bonaparte. "You weren't within telephoning distance of
victory all day. We simply played with you, my boy. It was a regular game
of golf for us. We let you keep up pretty close and win a few holes, but
on the home drive we had you beaten in one stroke. Go to, my dear
Bonaparte, and stop talking about the flood."

"It's a lucky thing for us that Noah wasn't a Frenchman, eh?" said
Frederick the Great. "How that rain would have fazed him if he had been!
The human race would have been wiped out."

"Oh, psha