How young we are, how very young! And think of all we have done!
Man is still a mere boy. He has only just within the last half-
century been put into trousers. Two thousand years ago he wore long
clothes--the Grecian robe, the Roman toga. Then followed the Little
Lord Fauntleroy period, when he went about dressed in a velvet suit
with lace collar and cuffs, and had his hair curled for him. The
late lamented Queen Victoria put him into trousers. What a wonderful
little man he will be when he is grown up!

A clergyman friend of mine told me of a German Kurhaus to which he
was sent for his sins and his health. It was a resort, for some
reason, specially patronized by the more elderly section of the
higher English middle class. Bishops were there, suffering from
fatty degeneration of the heart caused by too close application to
study; ancient spinsters of good family subject to spasms; gouty
retired generals. Can anybody tell me how many men in the British
Army go to a general? Somebody once assured me it was five thousand,
but that is absurd, on the face of it. The British Army, in that
case, would have to be counted by millions. There are a goodish few
American colonels still knocking about. The American colonel is
still to be met with here and there by the curious traveller, but
compared with the retired British general he is an extinct species.
In Cheltenham and Brighton and other favoured towns there are streets
of nothing but retired British generals--squares of retired British
generals--whole crescents of British generals. Abroad there are
pensions with a special scale of charges for British generals. In
Switzerland there has even been talk of reserving railway
compartments "For British Generals Only." In Germany, when you do
not say distinctly and emphatically on being introduced that you are
not a British general, you are assumed, as a matter of course, to be