respectful hand, has begun to unbend, to unfold, to expand like those Japanese dried flowers you fling into water; and having started with good mornings and weather comments and politics, and from them proceeded to the satisfactorily confused state of the British army, has gone on imperceptibly but surely to confidential criticisms of the mistakes made here at headquarters in invariably shelving the best officers at the very moment when they have arrived at what he describes as their prime, and has now reached the stage when he comes up through the orchard every morning at the hour I am due for my lesson to help me over the fence. He comes up with much stateliness and deliberation, but he does come up; and we walk down together, and every day the volume of his confidences increases and he more and more minutely describes his grievances. I listen and nod my head, which is easy and apparently all he wants. His wife stops him at once, if he begins to her, by telling him with as much roundness as is consistent with being born a Dammerlitz that the calamities that have overtaken them are entirely his fault. Why was he not as clever as those subordinates who were put over his head? she asks with dangerous tranquillity; and nobody can answer a question like that. 'It makes me twenty years younger,' he said yesterday as he handed me over the fence with the same politeness I have seen in the manner of old men handing large dowagers to their places in a set of quadrilles, 'to see your cheerful morning face.' 'If you had said shining morning face you'd have been quoting Shakespeare,' said I. 'Ah yes. I fear my Shakespeare days are done. I am now at the time of life when serious and practical considerations take up the entire attention of a man. Shakespeare is more suitable now for my daughter than for me.' 'But clever men do read him.' 'Ah yes.' 'Quite grown-up ones do.' 'Ah yes.' 'With beards.' 'Ah yes.' 'Real men.' 'Ah yes, yes. Professors. Theatre people. People of no family. People who have no serious responsibilities on their shoulders. People of the pen, not men of the sword. But officers--and who in our country of the well-born is not, was not, or will not be an officer?--have no time for general literature. Of course,' he added with a slight bow, for he regards me as personally responsible for everybody and everything English--'we have all heard of him.' 'Indeed?' said I. 'When I was a boy,' he said this morning, 'I read at school of a young woman--a mythological person--called Hebe.' 'She was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce,' said I. 'It may be,' he said. 'The parentages of the mythological period are curiously intricate. But why is it, dear Fräulein Schmidt, that though I can recollect nothing of her but her name, whenever I see you you remind me of her?'