Shalders retorted, that Lord Ormont was a reprobate.

Matey hoped he would some day write us an essay on the morale of illustrious generals of cavalry; and Shalders told him he did not advance his case by talking nonsense.

Each then repeated to the boys a famous exploit of his hero.  Their verdict was favourable to Lord Ormont.  Our English General learnt riding before he was ten years old, on the Pampas, where you ride all day, and cook your steak for your dinner between your seat and your saddle.  He rode with his father and his uncle, Muncastle, the famous traveller, into Paraguay.  He saw fighting before he was twelve.  Before he was twenty he was learning outpost duty in the Austrian frontier cavalry.  He served in the Peninsula, served in Canada, served in India, volunteered for any chance of distinction.  No need to say much of his mastering the picked Indian swordsmen in single combat:  he knew their trick, and was quick to save his reins when they made a dash threatening the headstroke—­about the same as disabling sails in old naval engagements.

That was the part for the officer; we are speaking of the General.  For that matter, he had as keen an eye for the field and the moment for his arm to strike as any Murat.  One world have liked to see Murat matched against the sabre of a wily Rajpoot!  As to campaigns and strategy, Lord Ormont’s head was a map.  What of Murat and Lord Ormont horse to horse and sword to sword?  Come, imagine that, if you are for comparisons.  And if Lord Ormont never headed a lot of thousands, it does not prove he was unable.  Lord Ormont was as big as Murat.  More, he was a Christian to his horses.  How about Murat in that respect?  Lord Ormont cared for his men:  did Murat so particularly much?  And he was as cunning fronting odds, and a thunderbolt at the charge.  Why speak of him in the past?  He is an English lord, a lord by birth, and he is alive; things may be expected of him to-morrow or next day.

Shalders here cut Matey short by meanly objecting to that.

“Men are mortal,” he said, with a lot of pretended stuff, deploring our human condition in the elegy strain; and he fell to reckoning the English hero’s age—­as that he, Lord Ormont, had been a name in the world for the last twenty-five years or more.  The noble lord could be no chicken.  We are justified in calculating, by the course of nature, that his term of activity is approaching, or has approached, or, in fact, has drawn to its close.

“If your estimate, sir, approaches to correctness,” rejoined Matey—­ tellingly, his comrades thought.

“Sixty, as you may learn some day, is a serious age, Matthew Weyburn.”

Matey said he should be happy to reach it with half the honours Lord Ormont had won.

“Excepting the duels,” Shalders had the impudence to say.

“If the cause is a good one!” cried Matey.

“The cause, or Lord Ormont has been maligned, was reprehensible in the extremest degree.”  Shalders cockhorsed on his heels to his toes and back with a bang.