--"

"With rotten eggs, and free fights, and ever so many broken heads!"
exclaimed Eric.

"And noses all bleeding and everybody drunk as can be," echoed Bertie,
who had carefully studied one of Hogarth's pictures.

"Nothing of the kind," said Harvey, "nothing in the least like that.
Votes will be put in the ballot-box, and the Mayor will count them--and
he will say which has received the most votes, and then the two
candidates will thank him for presiding, and each will say that the
contest has been conducted throughout in the pleasantest and most
straightforward fashion, and they part with expressions of mutual esteem.
There's a jolly game for you boys to play. I never had such toys when I
was young."

"I don't think we'll play with them just now," said Eric, with an entire
absence of the enthusiasm that his uncle had shown; "I think perhaps we
ought to do a little of our holiday task. It's history this time; we've
got to learn up something about the Bourbon period in France."

"The Bourbon period," said Harvey, with some disapproval in his voice.

"We've got to know something about Louis the Fourteenth," continued Eric;
"I've learnt the names of all the principal battles already."

This would never do. "There were, of course, some battles fought during
his reign," said Harvey, "but I fancy the accounts of them were much
exaggerated; news was very unreliable in those days, and there were
practically no war correspondents, so generals and commanders could
magnify every little skirmish they engaged in till they reached the
proportions of decisive battles. Louis was really famous, now, as a
landscape gardener; the way he laid out Versailles was so much admired
that it was copied all over Europe."

"Do you know anything about Madame Du Barry?" asked Eric; "didn't she
have her head chopped off?"

"She was another great lover of gardening," said Harvey, evasively; "in
fact, I believe the well known rose Du Barry was named after her, and now
I think you had better play for a little and leave your lessons till
later."

Harvey retreated to the library and spent some thirty or forty minutes in
wondering whether it would be possible to compile a history, for use in
elementary schools, in which there should be no prominent mention of
battles, massacres, murderous intrigues, and violent deaths. The York
and Lancaster period and the Napoleonic era would, he admitted to
himself, present considerable difficulties, and