“But the General was the peach. I presume you’re acquainted with the average run of British generals, but this was my first. I sat on his left hand, and he talked like—like the _Ladies’ Home Journal_. J’ever read that paper? It’s refined, Sir—and innocuous, and full of nickel-plated sentiments guaranteed to improve the mind. He was it. He began by a Lydia Pinkham heart-to-heart talk about my health, and hoped the boys had done me well, and that I was enjoying my stay in their midst. Then he thanked me for the interesting and valuable lessons that I’d given his crowd—specially in the matter of placing artillery and rearguard attacks. He’d wipe his long thin moustache between drinks—lime-juice and water he used—and blat off into a long ‘a-aah,’ and ladle out more taffy for me or old man Van Zyl on his right. I told him how I’d had my first Pisgah-sight of the principles of the Zigler when I was a fourth-class postmaster on a star-route in Arkansas. I told him how I’d worked it up by instalments when I was machinist in Waterbury, where the dollar-watches come from. He had one on his wrist then. I told him how I’d met Zalinski (he’d never heard of Zalinski!) when I was an extra clerk in the Naval Construction Bureau at Washington. I told him how my uncle, who was a truck-farmer in Noo Jersey (he loaned money on mortgage too, for ten acres ain’t enough now in Noo Jersey), how he’d willed me a quarter of a million dollars, because I was the only one of our kin that called him down when he used to come home with a hard-cider jag on him and heave ox-bows at his nieces. I told him how I’d turned in every red cent on the Zigler, and I told him the whole circus of my coming out with her, and so on, and so following; and every forty seconds he’d wipe his moustache and blat, ‘How interesting. Really, now? How interesting.’ “It was like being in an old English book, Sir. Like _Bracebridge Hall_. But an American wrote _that!_ I kept peeking around for the Boar’s Head and the Rosemary and Magna Charta and the Cricket on the Hearth, and the rest of the outfit. Then Van Zyl whirled in. He was no ways jagged, but thawed—thawed, Sir, and among friends. They began discussing previous scraps all along the old man’s beat—about sixty of ’em—as well as side-shows with other generals and columns. Van Zyl told ’im of a big beat he’d worked on a column a week or so before I’d joined him. He demonstrated his strategy with forks on the table. “‘There!’ said the General, when he’d finished. ‘That proves my contention to the hilt. Maybe I’m a bit of a pro-Boer, but I stick to it,’ he says, ‘that under proper officers, with due regard to his race prejudices, the Boer’ud make the finest mounted infantry in the Empire. Adrian,’ he says, ‘you’re simply squandered on a cattle-run. You ought to be at the Staff College with De Wet.’