emnly that it did matter, my
boy. It mattered a great deal. Credit was everything, the nation's
confidence was everything. A Government lived on credit and on nothing
else. And his father told him that he hadn't understood what his uncle
had been saying.

"If anybody asks _me_--" said Mr. Ransome. He interrupted himself to
stare terribly at Mrs. Ransome, who was sending a signal to her son and
a whisper, "Have a little slice of gingercake, Ran dear."

"If anybody asks me _my_ objection to a Tory Government, I'll put it for
'em," said Mr. Ransome, "in a nutshell."

"Let's have it, Fulleymore," said Mr. Randall.

And Mr. Ransome let him have it--in a nutshell.

"With a Tory Government you always, sooner or later, have a war. And
who," said Mr. Ransome, "_wants_ war?"

Mr. Randall bowed and made a motion of his hand toward his
brother-in-law, a complicated gesture which implied destruction of all
Tory Governments, homage to Mr. Ransome, and dismissal of the subject as
definitively settled by him.

Mrs. Ransome seized the moment to raise her eyebrows and the teapot
toward Mrs. Randall, and to whisper again, surreptitiously, "Jest
another little drain of tea?"

Then Ranny, who had tilted his chair most dangerously backward, was
heard saying something. A bit of scrap, now and then, with other nations
was, in Ranny's opinion, a jolly good thing. Kept you from gettin'
Flabby. Kept you Fit.

Mr. Randall, in a large, forbearing manner, dealt with Ranny. He wanted
to know whether he, Ranny, thought that the world was one almighty Poly.
Gym.?

And Mr. Ransome answered: "That's precisely what he does think. Made for
his amusement, the world is."

Ranny was young, and so they all treated him as if he were neither good
nor wise.

And Ranny, desperately tilted backward, looked at them all with a smile
that almost confirmed his father's view of his philosophy. He was
working up for his great outbreak. He could feel the laughter struggling
in his throat.

"I don't say," said Mr. Ransome, ignoring his son's folly, "that I'm
complaining of this Boer War in especial. If anything"--he weighed it,
determined, in his rectitude, to be just even to the war--"if anything
we sold more of some things."

"Now what," said Mrs. Randall, "do you sell most of in time of war?"

"Sleepin' draughts, heart mixture, nerve tonic, stomach mixture, and so
forth."

"And he can tell you," said Mr. Randall, "to a month's bookin' what
meddyci