ons.

"Great mistake ever to leave home in these days. Can't think what I am
coming to next. I merely stooped down to pick up a parcel--simplest
thing in the world; done it a score of times before--and over I went
full on my face. Terrible crash! Terrible crash! Paralysis now, I
expect, in addition to everything else. Just my luck! A wreck, sir--a
wreck! And I used to be the strongest man in the regiment. Ah, well,
well, that's all over! I must be content to be on the shelf now."

Betty turned towards the twins with a scrutinising gaze, but they had no
eyes for her. A note of real pathos had sounded in the victim's voice
as he bemoaned his lost strength, and their hearts melted before it.
Jack stepped boldly forward to make his confession.

"It was not paralysis, sir. It was--the parcel! We're sorry,--I'm
sorry, but it was only a joke, and we never thought you would fall. No
one else fell. We kept pulling it away by the string, you know, a _few_
inches at a time, so that you did not notice, but you had really farther
and farther to stretch, and it was that that made you topple over."

He paused, and the old gentleman stopped groaning and stared at him with
eyes of crab-like protuberance. The crimson flush deepened on his
cheeks, and his white whiskers appeared to bristle with wrath. He was
truly an awe-inspiring object.

"It was your doing, was it? You pulled away the parcel, did you? I
`toppled over,' did I?" he repeated with awful deliberation. That was
the lull before the storm, and then it broke in all its fury, and roared
over their heads, so that they gasped and trembled before it.

The victim went back to his earliest childhood, and thanked Providence
that he at least had known how to behave himself, and desist from silly,
idiotic, ridiculous, tom-fool tricks, which would disgrace a monkey on
an organ. He projected himself into the future, and prophesied ruin and
destruction for a race which produced popinjays and clowns. He
announced his intention of dying that very night, so that the crime
which his hearers had committed might be duly avenged, and in the same
breath would have them to know that he was not the sort of man to be
affected by the tricks of unmannerly cubs, and that General Terence
Digby was match for a hundred such as they, gout or no gout. Gout,
indeed! Toppled, forsooth! The world was coming to a pretty pass! Was
it part of the plot, might he ask, to cajole him into