"We prowled about, my Lord, for two or three hours, and at last reached Hougoumont, in time to take shelter against a tremendous storm which just then broke over us; and there it was that James accidentally came in contact with the young gentleman whom I may not wrongfully call the cause of all our misfortunes. It would appear that they began discussing the battle, with all the natural prejudices of the two conflicting sides. I will not affirm that James was very well read on the subject; indeed, my impression is that his stock of information was principally derived from a representation he had witnessed by an equestrian troop at home, and where Bony, after galloping twice round the circus, throws himself on his knees and begs for mercy,--a fact so strongly impressed upon his memory that he insisted the Frenchman should receive it as historical. The dispute, it would seem, was not conducted within the legitimate limits of debate; they waxed angry, and the Frenchman, after a fierce provocation, set off into the thickest of the storm rather than endure the further discussion." "This seems to me, sir," interposed the president, "to be perfectly irrelevant to the matter before us. The Court accords the very widest latitude to explanations, but if they really have no bearing on the case in hand,--if, as it appears to my learned brethren and myself, this polemic on a battle has no actual connection with your son's difficulties--" "It's the very source and origin of them, my Lord," broke I in. "He has no embarrassment which does not date from that incident and that hour." "In that case you may proceed, sir," said he, blandly; and I went on. "I do not mean to say, my Lord, that all that followed was inevitable; nor that, with cooler heads and calmer tempers, the whole affair could not have been arranged; but James is hot, mighty hot,--the Celt is strong in him. He really likes a 'shindy,' not like some chaps for the notoriety of it,--not because it gets into the newspapers, and makes a noise,--but he likes it for itself, and for its own intrinsic merits, as one might say. And I may remark here, my Lord, that the Irishman is, perhaps, the only man in Europe that understands fighting in this sense; and this trait, if rightly considered, will give a strong clew to our national character, and will explain the general failure of all our attempts at revolution. We take so much diversion in a row that we quite forget it's only the means to an end. We have, so to say, so much fun on the road that we lose sight of the place we were going to.