’That Demerara Supple-jack, Victor!  Don’t listen to Simeon; he’s a man of lean narrative, fit to chronicle political party wrangles and such like crop of carcase prose:  this is epical.  In drink we have Old England’s organic Epic; Greeks and Trojans; Parliamentary Olympus, ennobled brewers, nasal fanatics, all the machinery to hand.  Keep a straight eye on the primary motives of man, you’ll own the English produce the material for proud verse; they’re alive there!  Dartrey’s Demerara makes a pretty episode of the battle.  I haven’t seen it—­if it’s possible to look on it:  but I hear it is flexible, of a vulgar appearance in repose, Jove’s lightning at one time, the thong of AEacus at another.  Observe Dartrey marching off to the Station, for the purpose of laying his miraculous weapon across the shoulders of a son of Mars, who had offended.  But we have his name, my dear Victor!  His name, Simeon?—­Worrell; a Major Worrell:  his offence being probably, that he obtained military instruction in the Service, and left it at his convenience, for our poor patch and tatter British Army to take in his place another young student, who’ll grow up to do similarly.  And Dartrey, we assume, is off to stop that system.  You behold Sir Dartrey twirling the weapon in preparatory fashion; because he is determined we shall have an army of trained officers instead of infant amateurs heading heroic louts.  Not a thought of Beer in Dartrey!—­always unpatriotic, you ’ll say.  Plato entreats his absent mistress to fix eyes on a star:  eyes on Beer for the uniting of you English!  I tell you no poetic fiction.  Seeing him on his way, thus terribly armed, and knowing his intent, Venus, to shield a former favourite servant of Mars, conjured the most diverting of interventions, in the shape of a young woman in a poke-bonnet, and Skepsey, her squire, marching with a dozen or so, informing bedevilled mankind of the hideousness of our hymnification when it is not under secluding sanction of the Edifice, and challengeing criticism; and that was hard by, and real English, in the form of bludgeons, wielded by a battalion of the national idol Bungay Beervat’s boys; and they fell upon the hymners.  Here you fill in with pastoral similes.  They struck the maid adored by Skepsey.  And that was the blow which slew them!  Our little man drove into the press with a pair of fists able to do their work.  A valiant skiff upon a sea of enemies, he was having it on the nob, and suddenly the Demerara lightened.  It flailed to thresh.  Enough. to say, brains would have come.  The Bungays made a show of fight.  No lack of blood in them, to stock a raw shilling’s worth or gush before Achilles rageing.  You perceive the picture, you can almost sing the ballad.  We want only a few names of the fallen.  It was the carving of a maitre chef, according to Skepsey:  right-left-and point, with supreme precision:  they fell, accurately sliced from the joint.  Having done with them, Dartrey tossed the Demerara to Skepsey, and washed his hands of battle; and he let his major go unscathed.  Phlebotomy sufficient for the day!’