“Like Hector, handsome, and like Paris, brave!” whispers Frank Castlewood.  “A Venus, an elderly Venus, couldn’t refuse him a pippin.  Stand up, Harry.  See, we are drinking the army of Wynendael.  Ramillies is nothing to it.  Huzzay! huzzay!”

At this very time, and just after our General had made his acknowledgment, some one brought in an English Gazette—­and was passing it from hand to hand down the table.  Officers were eager enough to read it; mothers and sisters at home must have sickened over it.  There scarce came out a Gazette for six years that did not tell of some heroic death or some brilliant achievement.

“Here it is—­Action of Wynendael—­here you are, General,” says Frank, seizing hold of the little dingy paper that soldiers love to read so; and, scrambling over from our bench, he went to where the General sat, who knew him, and had seen many a time at his table his laughing, handsome face, which everybody loved who saw.  The generals in their great perukes made way for him.  He handed the paper over General Dohna’s buff-coat to our General on the opposite side.

He came hobbling back, and blushing at his feat:  “I thought he’d like it, Harry,” the young fellow whispered.  “Didn’t I like to read my name after Ramillies, in the London Gazette?—­Viscount Castlewood serving a volunteer—­I say, what’s yonder?”

Mr. Webb, reading the Gazette, looked very strange—­slapped it down on the table—­then sprang up in his place, and began to—­“Will your Highness please to—­”

His Grace the Duke of Marlborough here jumped up too—­“There’s some mistake, my dear General Webb.”

“Your Grace had better rectify it,” says Mr. Webb, holding out the letter; but he was five off his Grace the Prince Duke, who, besides, was higher than the General (being seated with the Prince of Savoy, the Electoral Prince of Hanover, and the envoys of Prussia and Denmark, under a baldaquin), and Webb could not reach him, tall as he was.

“Stay,” says he, with a smile, as if catching at some idea, and then, with a perfect courtesy, drawing his sword, he ran the Gazette through with the point, and said, “Permit me to hand it to your Grace.”

The Duke looked very black.  “Take it,” says he, to his Master of the Horse, who was waiting behind him.

The Lieutenant-General made a very low bow, and retired and finished his glass.  The Gazette in which Mr. Cardonnel, the Duke’s secretary, gave an account of the victory of Wynendael, mentioned Mr. Webb’s name, but gave the sole praise and conduct of the action to the Duke’s favorite, Mr. Cadogan.

There was no little talk and excitement occasioned by this strange behavior of General Webb, who had almost drawn a sword upon the Commander-in-Chief; but the General, after the first outbreak of his anger, mastered it outwardly altogether; and, by his subsequent behavior, had the satisfaction of even more angering the Commander-in-Chief, than he could have done by any public exhibition of resentment.