He was a tall, muscular, well-knit, soldierly-looking man with a cavalry moustache and big imperial. His accent was that of the Lowland Scot. On one of Ansdell’s afternoons the General, “intoxicated,” to use a famous phrase, “by the exuberance of his own verbosity,” or from other causes, retired from the convivial circle, and stretched himself out to rest on a couch at the end of the room. While “he lay like a warrior taking his rest,” some habitués of the room decorated the face of the sleeping hero with burnt cork and red paint, and when their artistic work had been effected McIver looked more like a Sioux Indian on the war-path than a Scots free-lance seeking repose. Hours afterwards he woke, and found himself in a smoking-room now filled with strangers. A loud laugh greeted his appearance when he arose—a giant refreshed. There could be no mistake that the laughter was directed against him. In his most heroic vein he demanded the cause of the company’s hilarity, and was referred to the mirror that was fixed above the fireplace. A wild Scottish whoop came from his throat. He turned on the assembly with a fierce expression and a commanding gesture. The laughter of the room broke out afresh. McIver was speechless with rage. He rushed from the place. But he was staying in the hotel at the time, and in half an hour returned in the opera-bouffe costume of a Brigadier-General in the army of a struggling nationality. He had washed the paint and charcoal from his face. He stood in the midst of the grinning assembly, and, drawing his sword, he inquired in an awful voice for the name of the perpetrator of the dastardly outrage, manifestly intent on cleaving that caitiff from helm to chine. But a fresh roar of inextinguishable laughter greeted his challenge. In the pages of “Under Fourteen Flags” he would have fallen upon that ribald crowd, cutting the infidels down man by man. In Fleet Street such a course was inexpedient. The _beau sabreur_, casting on the mockers a glance of superb disdain, exclaimed, “Ye’re a pauck o’ scoundrels sheltering a coward!” and stalked from the room with the air of a tragedy king, followed by the gibes of the now irate “scoundrels.” Mr. Gladstone—the G.O.M., I mean—was accustomed to ask strange people to his breakfast-table. But no stranger guest did he ever entertain than when McIver sat with him at that meal to give the great statesman his experiences in the Balkan States. Gladstone welcomed anyone who could give him the slightest information regarding what were known in the eighties as “Bulgarian atrocities,” and the Brigadier-General returned to England reputedly abounding with reliable news from that part of Europe. If Mr. Gladstone was greatly in the habit of taking his facts about the Eastern Question from authorities of the McIver kidney, it is little wonder that he led his countrymen astray when he inflamed their passions on the topic of atrocities with which he had become obsessed.