siesta within doors and,
in the words of Cai Tamblyn, "you might shot a cannon down the
streets of Troy, and no person would be shoot." This Cai (or Caius)
Tamblyn, an eccentric little man of uncertain age, with a black
servant Scipio, who wore a livery of green and scarlet and slept
under the stairs, made up the Major's male retinue. Between them
they carried his sedan chair; and because Cai (who walked in front)
measured but an inch above five feet, whereas Scipio stood six feet
three in his socks, the Major had a seat contrived with a sharp
backward slope, and two wooden buffers against which he thrust his
feet when going down-hill. Besides these, whom he was wont to call,
somewhat illogically, his two factotums, his household comprised Miss
Marty and a girl Lavinia who, as Miss Marty put it, did odds and
ends. Miss Marty was a poor relation, a third or fourth cousin on
the maternal side, whom the Major had discovered somewhere on the
other side of the Duchy, and promoted. Socially she did not count.
She asked no more than to be allowed to feed and array the Major, and
gaze after him as he walked down the street.

And what a progress it was!

Again I can see him as he made ready for it, standing in his doorway
at the head of a flight of steps, which led down from it to the small
wrought-iron gate opening on the street. The house has since been
converted into bank premises and its threshold lowered for the
convenience of customers. Gone are the plants--the myrtle on the
right of the porch, the jasmine on the left--with the balusters over
which they rambled, and the steps which the balusters protected--ah,
how eloquently the Major's sword clanked upon these as he descended!
But the high-pitched roof remains, with its three dormer windows
still leaning awry, and the plaster porch where a grotesque,
half-human face grins at you from the middle of a fluted sea-shell.
Standing before it with half-closed eyes, I behold the steps again,
and our great man at the head of them receiving his hat from the
obsequious Scipio, drawing on his gloves, looping his malacca cane to
his wrist by its tasselled cord of silk. The descent might be
military or might be civil: he was always Olympian.

"The handsome he is!" Miss Marty would sigh, gazing after him.

"A fine figure of a man, our Major!" commented Butcher Oke, following
him from the shop-door with a long stare, after the day's joint had
been discussed and chosen.

Th