We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly
sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major's
fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to submit
the reader to what we endured; therefore I will tell the story of
Major Brown in my own words. But the reader must imagine the
scene. The eyes of Basil closed as in a trance, after his habit,
and the eyes of Rupert and myself getting rounder and rounder as
we listened to one of the most astounding stories in the world,
from the lips of the little man in black, sitting bolt upright in
his chair and talking like a telegram.

Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no
means an enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement
on half-pay, it was with delight that he took a small neat villa,
very like a doll's house, and devoted the rest of his life to
pansies and weak tea. The thought that battles were over when he
had once hung up his sword in the little front hall (along with
two patent stew-pots and a bad water-colour), and betaken himself
instead to wielding the rake in his little sunlit garden, was to
him like having come into a harbour in heaven. He was Dutch-like
and precise in his taste in gardening, and had, perhaps, some
tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was one of those
men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand rather
than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw
life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he
would not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told
him that within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined
to be caught in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he
had never seen or dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat