"Your respectful and affectionate son,

"BONAPARTE."


It took some time to write this letter; for, with Napoleon,
letter-writing was always a detested task.

When he had written and directed it, he felt better. We always do feel
relieved, you know, if we speak out or write down our feelings. Then he
read a chapter in Plutarch about Alexander the Great. This set him to
thinking and planning how he would win a battle if he should ever become
a leader and commander. He had a notion that he knew just what he would
do; and, to prove that his plan was good, he threw himself on the garden
walk, and gathering a lot of pebbles, he began to set them in array,
as if they were soldiers, and to make all the moves and marches and
counter-marches of a furious battle. He indicated the generals and chief
officers in this army of stone by the larger pebbles; and you may be
sure that the largest pebble of all represented the commander-in-chief
--and that was Napoleon himself.

As he marshalled his pebble army, under the lead of his generals and
officers, shifting some, advancing others, rearranging certain of them
in squares, and massing others as if to resist an attack, Napoleon was
conscious of a snickering sort of laugh from somewhere above him.

He looked up, and caught sight of a mocking face looking down at him
from the top of the hedge that bordered his garden.