JIMMIEBOY RECEIVES HIS ORDERS.
For a few moments Jimmieboy was so overcome by the extreme novelty of
his position that he could do nothing but wander in and out among the
trees, wondering if he really was himself, and whether the soldiers by
whom he was surrounded were tin or creatures of flesh and blood. They
certainly looked and acted like human beings, and they talked in a
manner entirely different from what Jimmieboy was accustomed to expect
from the little pieces of painted tin he had so often played with on the
nursery floor, but he very soon learned that they were tin, and not made
up, like himself, of bone and sinew.
The manner of his discovery was this: One of the soldiers, in a very
rash and fool-hardy fashion, tried to pick up a stone from the road to
throw at a poor little zinc robin that was whistling in the trees above
his head, and in bending over after the stone and then straightening
himself up to take aim, he snapped himself into two distinct pieces--as
indeed would any other tin soldier, however strong and well made, and of
course Jimmieboy was then able to see that the band with whom he had for
the moment cast his fortunes were nothing more nor less than bits of
brittle tin, to whom in some mysterious way had come life. The boy was
pained to note the destruction of the little man who had tried to throw
the stone at the robin, because he was always sorry for everybody upon
whom trouble had come, but he was not, on the whole, surprised at the
soldier's plight, for the simple reason that he had been taught that
boys who threw stones at the harmless little birds in the trees were
naughty and worthy of punishment, and he could not see why a tin soldier
should not be punished for doing what a small boy of right feelings
would disdain to do.
After he had made up his mind that his companions were really of tin, he
became a bit fearful as to his own make-up, and the question that he now
asked himself was, "Am I tin, too, or what?" He was not long in
answering this question to his own satisfaction, for after bending his
little fingers to and fro a dozen or more times, he was relieved to
discover that he had not changed. The fingers did not snap off, as he
had feared they might, and he was glad.
Barely had Jimmieboy satisfied himself on this point when a handsomely
dressed soldier, on a blue lead horse, came galloping up, and cried out
so loud that his voice echoed through the tall trees of the forest:
"Is General Jimmieboy here?"
"Jimmieboy is here," answered the little fellow. "I'm Jimmieboy, but I
am no general."
"But you have on a general's uniform," said the soldier.
"Have I?" queried Jimmieboy, with a glance at his clothes. "Well, if I
have, it's because they are the only soldier clothes I own."
"Well, I am very sorry," said the soldier on horseback, "but if you wear
those clothes you've got to be general. It's a hard position to occupy,
and of course you'd rather be a high-private or a member of the band,
but as it is, there is no way out of it. If the clothes would fit any
one else here, you might exchange with him; but they won't, I can tell
that by looking at the yellow stripes on your trousers. The stripes
alone are wider than any of our legs."
"Oh!" responded Jimmieboy, "I don't mind being general. I'd just as lief
be a general as not; I know how to wave a sword and march ahead of the
procession."
At this there was a roar of laughter from the soldiers.
"How queer!" said one.
"What an absurd idea!" cried another.
"Where did he ever get such notions as that?" said a third.
And then they all laughed again.
"I am afraid," said the soldier on horseback, with a kindly smile which
won Jimmieboy's heart, "that you do not understand what the duties of a
general are in this country. We aren't bound down by the notions of you
nursery people, who seem to think that all a general is good for is to
be stood up in front of a cannon loaded with beans, and knocked over
half a dozen times in the course of a battle. Have you ever read those
lines of High-private Tinsel in his little book, 'Poems in Pewter,' in
which he tells of the trials of a general of the tin soldiers?"
"Of course I haven't," said Jimmieboy. "I can't read."
"Just the man for a general, if he can't read," said one of the
soldiers. "He'll never know what the newspapers say of him."
"Well, I'll tell you the story," said the horseman, dismounting, and
standing on a stump by the road-side to give better effect to the poem,
which he recited as follows:
"THE TIN SOLDIER GENERAL.
I walked one day
Along the way
That leads from camp to city;
And I espied
At the road-side
The hero of my ditty.
His massive feet,
In slippers neat,
Were crossed in desperation;
And from his eyes
Salt tears did rise
In awful exudation."
"In what?" asked Jimmieboy, who was not quite used to grown-up words
like exudation.
"Quarts," replied the soldier, with a frown. "Don't interrupt. This poem
isn't good for much unless it goes right through without a stop--like an
express train."
And then he resumed:
"It filled my soul
With horrid dole
To see this wailing creature;
How tears did sweep,
And furrow deep,
Along his nasal feature!
My eyes grew dim
To look at him,
To see his tear-drops soiling
His necktie bold,
His trimmings gold,
And all his rich clothes spoiling;
And so I stopped,
Beside him dropped,
And quoth, 'Wilt tell me, mortal,
Wherefore you sighed?'
And he replied:
'Wilt I? Well, I shouldst chortle.'"
"I don't know what chortle means," said Jimmieboy.
"Neither do I," said the soldier. "But I guess the man who wrote the
poem did, so it's all right, and we may safely go on to the next verse,
which isn't very different in its verbiology--"
"Its wha-a-at?" cried a dozen tin soldiers at once.
"Gentlemen," said the declaiming soldier, severely, "there are some
words in our language which no creature should be asked to utter more
than once in a life-time, and that is one of them. I shall not endanger
my oratorical welfare by speaking it again. Suffice it for me to say
that if you want to use that word yourselves, you will find it in the
dictionary somewhere under F, or Z, or Ph, or some other letter which I
cannot at this moment recall. But the poem goes on to say:
"Then as we sat
The road-side at--
His tears a moment quelling--
In accents pale
He told the tale
Which I am also telling."
"Dear me!" said a little green corporal at Jimmieboy's side. "Hasn't he
begun the story yet?"
"Yes, stupid," said a high-private. "Of course he has; but it's one of
those stories that take a long time to begin, and never finish until the
very end."
"Oh yes, I know," said another. "It's a story like one I heard of the
other day. You can lay it down whenever you want to, and be glad to have
the chance."
"That's it," said the high-private.
"I wish you fellows would keep still," said the soldier who was
reciting. "I ought to have been a quarter of the way through the first
half of that poem by this time, and instead of that I'm only a sixteenth
of the way through the first eighth."
"You can't expect to go more than eight miles an hour," said the
corporal, "even in poetry like that. It can't be done."
"But what happened?" asked Jimmieboy, who was quite interested to hear
the rest of the poem.
"I'll have to tell you some other time, general," replied the soldier.
"These tin warriors here haven't any manners. Some day, when you have
time to spare, I'll tell you the rest of it, because I know you'll be
glad to hear it."
"Yes, general," put in the corporal, with a laugh. "Some day when you
have a year to spare get him to tell you the first twenty-seventh of the
next ninety-sixth of it. It won't take him more than eleven months and
thirty-two days to do it."
"Bah!" said the poetic soldier, mounting his horse and riding off with
an angry flush on his cheek. "Some day, when I get promoted to the
ranks, I'll get even with you."
"Who is he, anyhow?" asked Jimmieboy, as the soldier rode off.
"He's Major Blueface, and he has to look after the luggage," replied the
corporal. "And as for that poem of his, Jimmieboy, I want to warn you.
He has a printed copy of it that takes seven trunks to carry. He says it
was written by High-private Tinsel, but that's all nonsense. He wrote it
himself."
"Then I like it all the better," said Jimmieboy. "I always like what
people I like write."
"There's no accounting for tastes," returned the corporal. "We don't any
of us like the major. That's why we made him major. Looking after
luggage is such awfully hard work, we didn't want to make any one else
do it, and so we elected him."
"Why don't you like him?" asked Jimmieboy. "He seems to me to be a very
nice soldier."
"That's just it," returned the corporal. "He's just the kind of soldier
to please little boys like you, and he'd look perfectly splendid in a
white and gold parlor like your mamma's, but in camp he's a terror.
Keeps his boots shined up like a looking-glass; wears his Sunday uniform
all the time; in fact, he has seven Sunday uniforms--one for each day of
the week; and altogether he makes the rest of us feel so mean and cheap
that we can't like him. He offered a prize once to the soldier who'd
like him the best, and who do you think won it?"
"I don't know," said Jimmieboy. "Who?"
"He won it himself," retorted the corporal. "Nobody else tried. But
you'd better go over to the colonel's quarters right away, Jimmieboy.
You know he wants you."
"He hasn't sent for me, has he?" asked the boy.
"Of course he has. That's what the major came to tell you," answered the
corporal.
"But he didn't say so," returned Jimmieboy.
"No, he never does what he is sent to do," explained the corporal.
"That's how we know. If he had told you the colonel wanted you, we'd all
know the colonel didn't want you. He's a queer bird, that major. He's so
anxious to read his poem to somebody that he always forgets his orders,
and when he does half remember what he is sent to do, we can tell what
the orders are by what he doesn't say."
"I shouldn't think he'd be a good man to look after the luggage if he
forgets everything that way," said Jimmieboy.
"That's just where he's great," returned the corporal. "For, don't you
see, every man in the regiment wants to carry about three times as much
luggage as he ought to, and the major makes it all right by forgetting
two-thirds of it. Oh, there's no denying that he's one of the greatest
luggage men there ever was; but you run along now, or the colonel may
lose his temper, and that always delays things."
"I'm not afraid of the colonel," said Jimmieboy, bravely.
"Neither are we," said the corporal, in reply to this, "but we don't
like to have our campaign delayed, and when the colonel loses his temper
we have to wait and wait until he finds it again. Sometimes it takes him
a whole week."
So Jimmieboy, wondering more and more at the singular habits of the tin
soldiers, ran off in search of the colonel, whom he found sitting by the
brook-side fishing, and surrounded by his staff.
"Hello!" said Jimmieboy, as he caught sight of the colonel. "Having any
luck?"
"Lots," said the colonel. "Been here only five minutes, and I've caught
three hickory twigs, a piece of wire, and one of the finest colds in my
head I ever had."
"Good," said Jimmieboy, with a laugh. "But aren't there any fish there?"
"Plenty of 'em," answered the colonel. "But they're all so small I'd
have to throw 'em back if I caught 'em. They know that well enough, and
so save me trouble by not biting. But I say, I suppose you know we can't
start this expedition without ammunition?"
"What's that?" queried Jimmieboy, to whom the word ammunition was
entirely new.
"Ammunition? Why, that's stuff to load our guns with," returned the
colonel. "You must be a great general not to know that."
"You must excuse me," said Jimmieboy, with a blush. "There is a great
deal that I don't know. I'm only five years old, and papa hasn't had
time to tell me everything yet."
"Well, it's all right, anyhow," replied the colonel. "You'll learn a
great deal in the next hundred years, so we won't criticise; but of
course, you know, we can't go off without ammunition any more than a gun
can. Now, as general of the forces, it is your duty to look about you
and lay in the necessary supplies. For the guns we shall need about
fourteen thousand rounds of preserved cherries, seventeen thousand
rounds of pickled peaches for the cannon, and a hundred and sixty-two
dozen cans of strawberry jam for me."
Jimmieboy's eyes grew so round and large as he listened to these words
that the major turned pale.
"Then," continued the colonel, "we have to have powder and shell, of
course. Perhaps four hundred and sixteen pounds of powdered sugar and
ninety-seven barrels of shells with almonds in 'em would do for our
purposes."
"But--but what are we to do with all these things, and where am I to
get them?" gasped Jimmieboy, beginning to be very sorry that he had
accepted so important a position as that of general.
"Do with 'em?" cried the colonel. "What'll we do with 'em? Why, capture
the Parallelopipedon, of course. What did you suppose we'd do with
'em--throw them at canary-birds?"
"You don't load guns with preserved cherries, do you?" asked the boy.
"We don't, eh? Well, I just guess we do," returned the colonel. "And we
load the cannon with pickled peaches, and to keep me from deserting and
going over to the enemy, they keep me loaded to the muzzle with
strawberry jam from the time I start until we get back."
"You can't kill a Parawelopipedon with cherries and peaches, can you?"
asked Jimmieboy.
"Not quite, but nearly," said the colonel. "We never hit him with enough
of them to kill him, but just try to coax him with 'em, don't you see?
We don't do as you do in your country. We don't shoot the enemy with
lead bullets, and try to kill him and make him unhappy. We try to coax
him back by shooting sweetmeats at him, and if he won't be coaxed, we
bombard him with pickled peaches until they make him sick, and then he
has to surrender."
"It must be pretty fine to be an enemy," said Jimmieboy, smacking his
lips as he thought of being bombarded with sweetmeats.
"It is," exclaimed the colonel, with enthusiasm. "It's so nice, that
they have to do the right thing by me in the matter of jam to keep me
from being an enemy myself."
"But what do I get?" returned Jimmieboy, who couldn't see why it would
not be pleasant for him to be an enemy, and get all these delightful
things.
"You? Why, you get the almonds and the powdered sugar and all the
mince-pie you can eat--what more do you want?" said the colonel.
"Nothing," gasped Jimmieboy, overcome by the prospect. "I wouldn't mind
being a general for a million years at that rate."
With which noble sentiment the little fellow touched his cap to the
colonel, and set off, accompanied by a dozen soldiers, to find the
cherries, the peaches, the almonds, and the powdered sugar.