thousand.  Our fleet was our one chance.  Any foreign General at the head of fifty thousand trained, picked troops would risk it, and cut an ‘entrechat’ for joy of the chance.  We should have fought and bled and been marched over—­a field of Anglo-Saxon stubble! and Nelson riding the Channel, undisputed lord of the waters.  Heigh! by the Lord, this country would have been like a man free to rub his skin with his hand and a mortal disease in his blood.  Are you ready?  How anticipate a hostile march on the capital, is our business.’

Striding up and down the library, Lord Ormont dropped his wrath to dictate the practical measures for defence—­detesting the cat’s-cry ‘defence,’ he said; but the foe would bring his old growlers, and we should have to season our handful of regulars and mob of levies, turn the mass into troops.  With plenty of food, and blows daily, Englishmen soon get stomachs for the right way to play the game; bowl as well as bat; and the sooner they give up the idea of shamming sturdy on a stiff hind leg, the better for their chances.  Only, it’s a beastly thing to see that for their favourite attitude;—­like some dog of a fellow weak in the fists, weaker in the midriff, at a fair, who cries, Come on, and prays his gods you won’t.  All for peace, the rascal boasts himself, and he beats his wife and kicks his curs at home.  Is there any one to help him now, he vomits gold and honours on the man he yesterday treated as a felon.  Ha!

Bull the bumpkin disposed of, my lord drew leisurely back from the foeman’s landing-place, at the head of a body of serious Englishmen; teaching them to be manageable as chess-pieces, ready as bow-strings to let fly.  Weyburn rejoiced to find himself transcribing crisp sentences, hard on the matter, without garnish of scorn.  Kent, Sussex, Surrey, all the southern heights about London, round away to the south-western of the Hampshire heathland, were accurately mapped in the old warrior’s brain.  He knew his points of vantage by name; there were no references to gazetteer or atlas.  A chain of forts and earthworks enables us to choose our ground, not for clinging to them, but for choice of time and place to give battle.  If we have not been playing double-dyed traitor to ourselves, we have a preponderating field artillery; our yeomanry and volunteer horsemen are becoming a serviceable cavalry arm; our infantry prove that their heterogeneous composition can be welded to a handy mass, and can stand fire and return it, and not be beaten by an acknowledged defeat.

‘That’s English! yes, that’s English! when they’re at it,’ my lord sang out.

‘To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end,’ cried Weyburn; his former enthusiasm for the hero mounting, enlightened by a reminiscence of the precept he had hammered on the boys at Cuper’s.