The man for whom the dinner was given, Colonel Robert Thornton, my cousin, a Canadian, who got his leg shot off at Vimy Ridge, was making oration about the German Crown Prince’s tactics at Verdun, and that was the reason that ten men were not paying attention to me and that I was not paying attention to Bobby.  When the good chap talks human talk, tells what happened to people and what their psychological processes seemed to be, he is entertaining.  He has a genuine gift of sympathy and a power to lead others in the path he treads; in short, he tells a good story.  But like most people who do one thing particularly well he is always priding himself on the way he does something else.  He likes to look at Colonel Thornton as a student of the war, and he has the time of his life when he can get people to listen to what he knows Joffre and Foch and Haig and Hindenberg ought to have done.  So at this moment he was enjoying his evening, for the men I had asked to meet him, all strangers to him, ignorant of his real powers, were hanging on his words, partly because no one can help liking him whatever he talks about, and partly because, with that pathetic empty trouser-leg and the crutch hooked over his chair, he was an undoubted hero.  So I heard the sentences ambling, and reflected that Hilaire Belloc with maps and a quiet evening would do my tactical education more good than Bobby Thornton’s discursions.  And about then I chuckled unnoticed, over the silly frogs’ legs.

“Tell me, Colonel Thornton, do you consider that the French made a mistake in concentrating so much of their reserve—­” It was the Governor himself who was demanding this earnestly of Bobby.  And I saw that the Governor and the rest were hypnotized, and did not need me.

So I sat at the head of the table, and waiters brooded over us, and cucumbers and the usual trash happened, and Bobby held forth while the ten who were bidden listened as to one sent from heaven.  And, being superfluous, I withdrew mentally to a canoe in a lonely lake and went frogging.

Vicariously.  I do not like frogging in person.  The creature smiles.  Also he appeals because he is ugly and complacent.  But for the grace of God I might have looked so.  He sits in supreme hideousness frozen to the end of a wet log, with his desirable hind legs spread in view, and smiles his bronze smile of confidence in his own charm and my friendship.  It is more than I can do to betray that smile.  So, hating to destroy the beast yet liking to eat the leg, about once in my summer vacation in camp I go frogging, and make the guides do it.

It would not be etiquette to send them out alone, for in our club guides are supposed to do no fishing or shooting—­no sport.  Therefore, I sit in a canoe and pretend to take a frog in a landing-net and miss two or three and shortly hand over the net to Josef.  We have decided on landing-nets as our tackle.  I once shot the animals with a .22 Flobert rifle, but almost invariably they dropped, like a larger bullet, off the log and into the mud, and that was the end.  We never could retrieve them.  Also at one time we fished them with a many-pronged hook and a bit of red flannel.  But that seemed too bitter a return for the bronze smile, and I disliked the method, besides being bad at it.  We took to the landing-net.