eyes of Rupert
and myself getting rounder and rounder as we listened to one of the
most astounding stories in the world, from the lips of the little man in
black, sitting bolt upright in his chair and talking like a telegram.

Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an
enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement on half-pay,
it was with delight that he took a small neat villa, very like a doll's
house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The
thought that battles were over when he had once hung up his sword in
the little front hall (along with two patent stew-pots and a bad
water-colour), and betaken himself instead to wielding the rake in his
little sunlit garden, was to him like having come into a harbour in
heaven. He was Dutch-like and precise in his taste in gardening, and
had, perhaps, some tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was
one of those men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand
rather than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw
life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he would
not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told him that
within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught
in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he had never seen or
dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.

One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual
faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing
from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass
along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the back-garden
walls of a row of mansions, and which in their empty and discoloured
appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a
theatre. But mean and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of
us, it was not altogether so in the Major's, for along the coarse
gravel footway was coming a thing which was to him what the passing of
a religious procession is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with
fish-blue eyes and a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before
him a barrow, which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were
splendid specimens of almost every order, but the Major's own favourite
pansies predominated. The Major stopped and fell into conversation, and
then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of coll