the question that he now asked himself was, "Am I tin, too, or what?" He was not long in answering this question to his own satisfaction, for after bending his little fingers to and fro a dozen or more times, he was relieved to discover that he had not changed. The fingers did not snap off, as he had feared they might, and he was glad.
Barely had Jimmieboy satisfied himself on this point when a handsomely dressed soldier, on a blue lead horse, came galloping up, and cried out so loud that his voice echoed through the tall trees of the forest:
"Is General Jimmieboy here?"
"Jimmieboy is here," answered the little fellow. "I'm Jimmieboy, but I am no general."
"But you have on a general's uniform," said the soldier.
"Have I?" queried Jimmieboy, with a glance at his clothes. "Well, if I have, it's because they are the only soldier clothes I own."
"Well, I am very sorry," said the soldier on horseback, "but if you wear those clothes you've got to be general. It's a hard position to occupy, and of course you'd rather be a high-private or a member of the band, but as it is, there is no way out of it. If the clothes would fit any one else here, you might exchange with him; but they won't, I can tell that by looking at the yellow stripes on your trousers. The stripes alone are wider than any of our legs."
"Oh!" responded Jimmieboy, "I don't mind being general. I'd just as lief be a general as not; I know how to wave a sword and march ahead of the procession."
At this there was a roar of laughter from the soldiers.
"How queer!" said one.
"What an absurd idea!" cried another.
"Where did he ever get such notions as that?" said a third.
And then they all laughed again.
"I am afraid," said the soldier on horseback, with a kindly smile which won Jimmieboy's heart, "that you do not understand what the duties of a general are in this country. We aren't bound down by the notions of you nursery people, who seem to think that all a general is good for is to be stood up in front of a cannon loaded with beans, and knocked over half a dozen times in the course of a battle. Have you ever read those lines of High-private Tinsel in his little book, 'Poems in Pewter,' in which he tells of the trials of a general of the tin soldiers?"
"Of course I haven't," said Jimmieboy. "I can't read."
"Just the man for a general, if he can't read," said one of the soldiers. "He'll never know what the newspapers say of him."
"Well, I'll tell you the story," said the horseman, dismounting, and standing on a stump by the road-side to give better effect to the poem, which he recited as follows:
I walked one day
Along the way
That leads from camp to city;
And I espied
At the road-side
The hero of my ditty.
His massive feet,
In slippers neat,
Were crossed in desperation;
And from his eyes
Salt tears did rise
In awful exudation."
"In what?" asked Jimmieboy, who was not quite used to grown-up words like exudation.
"Quarts," replied the soldier, with a frown. "Don't interrupt. This poem isn't good for much unless it goes right through without a stop – like an express train."
And then he resumed:
"It filled my soul
With horrid dole
To see this wailing creature;
How tears did sweep,
And furrow deep,
Along his nasal feature!
My eyes grew dim
To look at him,
To see his tear-drops soiling
His necktie bold,
His trimmings gold,
And all his rich clothes spoiling;
And so I stopped,
Beside him dropped,
And quoth, 'Wilt tell me, mortal,
Wherefore you sighed?'
And he replied:
'Wilt I? Well, I shouldst chortle.'"
"I don't know what chortle means," said Jimmieboy.
"Neither do I," said the soldier. "But I guess the man who wrote the poem did, so it's all right, and we may safely go on to the next verse, which isn't very different in its verbiology – "
"Its wha-a-at?" cried a dozen tin soldiers at once.
"Gentlemen," said the declaiming soldier, severely, "there are some words in our language which no creature should be asked to utter more than once in a life-time, and that is one of them. I shall not endanger my oratorical welfare by speaking it again. Suffice it for me to say that if you want to use that word yourselves, you will find it in the dictionary somewhere under F, or Z, or Ph, or some other letter which I cannot at this moment recall. But the poem goes on to say:
"Then as we sat
The road-side at —
His tears a moment quelling —
In accents pale
He told the tale
Which I am also telling."
"Dear me!" said a little green corporal at Jimmieboy's side. "Hasn't he begun the story yet?"
"Yes, stupid," said a high-private. "Of course he has; but it's one of those stories that take a long time to begin, and never finish until the very end."
"Oh yes, I know," said another. "It's a story like one I heard of the other day. You can lay it down whenever you want to, and be glad to have the chance."
"That's it," said the high-private.
"I wish you fellows would keep still," said the soldier who was reciting. "I ought to have been a quarter of the way through the first half of that poem by this time, and instead of that I'm only a sixteenth of the way through the first eighth."
"You can't expect to go more than eight miles an hour," said the corporal, "even in poetry like that. It can't be done."
"But what happened?" asked Jimmieboy, who was quite interested to hear the rest of the poem.
"I'll have to tell you some other time, general," replied the soldier. "These tin warriors here haven't any manners. Some day, when you have time to spare, I'll tell you the rest of it, because I know you'll be glad to hear it."
"Yes, general," put in the corporal, with a laugh. "Some day when you have a year to spare get him to tell you the first twenty-seventh of the next ninety-sixth of it. It won't take him more than eleven months and thirty-two days to do it."
"Bah!" said the poetic soldier, mounting his horse and riding off with an angry flush on his cheek. "Some day, when I get promoted to the ranks, I'll get even with you."
"Who is he, anyhow?" asked Jimmieboy, as the soldier rode off.
"He's Major Blueface, and he has to look after the luggage," replied the corporal. "And as for that poem of his, Jimmieboy, I want to warn you. He has a printed copy of it that takes seven trunks to carry. He says it was written by High-private Tinsel, but that's all nonsense. He wrote it himself."
"Then I like it all the better," said Jimmieboy. "I always like what people I like write."
"There's no accounting for tastes," returned the corporal. "We don't any of us like the major. That's why we made him major. Looking after luggage is such awfully hard work, we didn't want to make any one else do it, and so we elected him."
"Why