They had
heard the story, and, by their reception of us they tried to show that
they strongly disapproved of their countryman's insult to the
colonials.
A few minutes afterwards, the clock struck nine, and the doors were
closed upon all but Captain Ellis and myself. Nothing was too good for
us, and to the accompaniment of numerous cups of coffee, brought by
Norah, we talked away till ten o'clock. Both the landlord and his wife
walked out to our car with us, and continued to offer their regrets
for the treatment which we had received.
By the time we got "home" we were fairly cooled off, and we went to
bed that night with the proud feeling that we had saved the name of
Canada.
Another time "things went wrong" was one Saturday afternoon when we
took a half-day off. It was not that we needed the holiday from
overwork, because, for two weeks, three of the four of us had been
doing nothing. The fourth man, a captain of Highland descent, had,
unlike the rest of us, really been working hard. Yet we all needed the
holiday, for loafing anywhere is usually the hardest work in the
world; but loafing on the edge of Salisbury Plain with little to see
was work even harder than the hardest. Napoleon is said to have
remarked that "war is made up of short periods of intense activity
followed by much longer periods of enforced idleness" or something to
that effect.
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