he dies, like the boots of Michelangelo, probably will require to be
pried loose from him, so incessantly has he worn them within the memory
of man. None has ever looked upon him in the open air without his
cane. And is not that emblem of omniscience and authority, the
schoolmaster's ferule, directly of the cane family? So large has the
cane loomed in the matter of chastisement that the word cane has become
a verb, to cane.

There was (in the days before the war) a military man (friend of mine),
a military man of the old school, in whom could be seen, shining like a
flame, a man's great love of a cane. He had lived a portion of his
life in South America, and he used to promenade every pleasant
afternoon up and down the Avenue swinging a sharply pointed,
steel-ferruled swagger-stick. "What's the use of carrying that
ridiculous thing around town?" some one said to him one day.

"That!" he rumbled in reply (he was one of the roarers among men),
"why, that's to stab scorpions with."

They've buried him, I heard, in Flanders; on his breast (I hope), his
cane.

"When a Red Cross platoon," says a news despatch of the other day, "was
advancing to the aid of scores of wounded men. Surgeon William J.
McCracken of the British Medical Corps ordered all to take cover, and
himself advanced through the enemy's fire, bearing a Red Cross flag on
his walking-stick."

Indeed, the Great War is one of the most thrilling, momentous and
colourful chapters in the history of canes. "The officers picked up