a further definition of Genius, think of it as a form of swiftness.  It is the lively young great-grandson, in the brain, of the travelling force which mathematicians put to paper, in a row of astounding ciphers, for the motion of earth through space; to the generating of heat, whereof is multiplication, whereof deposited matter, and so your chaos, your half-lighted labyrinth, your, ceaseless pressure to evolvement; and then Light, and so Creation, order, the work of Genius.  What do you say?

Without having a great brain, the measure of it possessed by Skepsey was alive under strong illumination.  In his heart, while doing penance for his presumptuousness, he believed that he could lead regiments of men.  He was not the army’s General, he was the General’s Lieutenant, now and then venturing to suggest a piece of counsel to his Chief.  On his own particular drilled regiments, his Chief may rely; and on his knowledge of the country of the campaign, roads, morasses, masking hills, dividing rivers.  He had mapped for himself mentally the battles of conquerors in his favourite historic reading; and he understood the value of a plan, and the danger of sticking to it, and the advantage of a big army for flanking; and he manoeuvred a small one cunningly to make it a bolt at the telling instant.  Dartrey Fenellan had explained to him Frederick’s oblique attack, Napoleon’s employment of the artillery arm preparatory to the hurling of the cataract on the spot of weakness, Wellington’s parallel march with Marmont up to the hour of the decisive cut through the latter at Salamanca; and Skepsey treated his enemy to the like, deferentially reporting the engagement to a Chief whom his modesty kept in eminence, for the receiving of the principal honours.  As to his men, of all classes and sorts, they are so supple with training that they sustain a defeat like the sturdy pugilist a knock off his legs, and up smiling a minute after—­one of the truly beautiful sights on this earth!  They go at the double half a day, never sounding a single pair of bellows among them.  They have their appetites in full control, to eat when they can, or cheerfully fast.  They have healthy frames, you see; and as the healthy frame is not artificially heated, it ensues that, under any title you like, they profess the principles—­into the bog we go, we have got round to it!—­the principles of those horrible marching and chanting people!

Then, must our England, to be redoubtable to the enemy, be a detestable country for habitation?

Here was a knot.

Skepsey’s head dropped lower, he went as a ram.  The sayings of Mr. Durance about his dear England:  that ’her remainder of life is in the activity of her diseases’—­that ’she has so fed upon Pap of Compromise as to be unable any longer to conceive a muscular resolution’:  that ’she is animated only as the carcase to the blow-fly’; and so forth:—­charged on him during his wrestle with his problem.  And