For Neale, with no other children in the family, the day was always solitary; not unpleasantly so. It was a day for long imaginings, stirring, warlike imaginings, realized through lead soldiers. Lead soldiers were a passion of his little boyhood. He had two hundred and ten, counting the ones with their legs broken, that he had mounted on half corks. He did not move them around much. He did not knock them down. When he got them set up in the order he wished, he fell into a trance, imagining stories and incidents. It took a long time to get them arranged to his satisfaction, with stiff marching columns, at shoulder-arms in the middle, some Indian sharp-shooters prone or kneeling behind painted lead shrubbery out in front, a squadron of parade cavalry on one wing, a troop of galloping Arabs on the other. Always he had a pile of blocks behind which a coal-black charger was tethered, and on top, leaning against a spool of thread, stood the general surveying his army. By uniform and whiskers the toymaker had intended the figure for Kaiser Wilhelm I; but to the boy's eyes it was no Prussian king, but Neale--Neale commanding his victorious troops. It was all arranged with a careful hand and a loving heart, and it took a long, long time. Very often the dinner-bell rang before he had even finished setting them up. At Sunday dinner there was generally "company," men friends of Father's mostly, but sometimes husbands and wives. Neale knew all their names, and shook hands without self-consciousness. He grinned silently if they spoke to him, and retired to his shell, busying himself with his own thoughts, all concentrated on the impending battle. He liked the things you had to eat on Sunday and had found that on Sunday he could eat the soft parts out of his bread and hide the crusts under the edge of his plate. Mother always caught him if he tried that on week-days, but on Sundays, with company there, she never said a word. But no matter how slowly he ate, he was always through, wriggling uncomfortably on his chair and horribly bored, while those tedious grown-up people were still gabbling on. Mother always saw this, took pity, and smiled a permission to him to be off. He slipped from his chair and tip-toed silently into the kitchen where Katie was dressing the salad. But she stopped long enough to open the pasteboard ice-cream box from Schlauchter's candy-store and give him a saucer-full from the soft part on top. Then he hurried upstairs again to act out with his army the glorious scenes he had been imagining during dinner. Sometimes it was a surprise attack on the march, with cavalry sweeping down on limbered guns, sometimes it was artillery formed in triangles, a muzzle at each apex, blowing the advancing cavalry to flinders. Sometimes it was a magnificent parade of triumph through a city gate with Kaiser Wilhelm (Neale) at their head.