honor, and he has no use for fighting in the wet and coming out of the
fight conspicuous as a victor with the curl out of his feathers and his
epaulets rusted with the damp. There is no glory in water. But if we had
had umbrellas and mackintoshes, as every Englishman who comes to the
Continent always has, and a bath-tub for everybody, then would your
Waterloo have been different again, and the great democracy of Europe with
a Bonaparte for emperor would have been founded for what the Americans
call the keeps; and as for your little Great Britain, ha! she would have
become the Blackwell's Island of the Greater France."

"You're almost as funny as _Punch_ isn't," drawled Wellington, with an
angry gesture at Bonaparte. "You weren't within telephoning distance of
victory all day. We simply played with you, my boy. It was a regular game
of golf for us. We let you keep up pretty close and win a few holes, but
on the home drive we had you beaten in one stroke. Go to, my dear
Bonaparte, and stop talking about the flood."

"It's a lucky thing for us that Noah wasn't a Frenchman, eh?" said
Frederick the Great. "How that rain would have fazed him if he had been!
The human race would have been wiped out."

"Oh, pshaw!" ejaculated Noah, deprecating the unseemliness of the quarrel,
and putting his arm affectionately about Bonaparte's shoulder. "When you
come down to that, I was French--as French as one could be in those
days--and these Gallic subjects of my friend here were, every one of 'em,
my lineal descendants, and their hatred of rain was inherited directly
from me, their ancestor."

"Are not we English as much your descendants?" queried Wellington, arching
his eyebrows.