not go in for glory at the expense of his dignity; style, form, is
dearer to him than 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."