ad never known, in that it was a war to end war
forever, and to ensure eternal peace for everybody's children. Never, as
he put it forcefully, had men fought for a more glorious cause. And so
on and go on, said he, and these uplifting thoughts had a fine effect
upon everyone.

"How wonderfully you speak!" Dame Niafer would say admiringly.

And Manuel would look at her queerly, and reply: "I am earning your
home, my dear, and your servants' wages, and some day these verbal
jewels will be perpetuated in a real coronet. For I perceive that a
former acquaintance of mine was right in pointing out the difference
between men and the other animals."

"Ah, yes, indeed!" said Niafer, very gravely, and not attaching any
particular meaning to it, but generally gathering that she and Manuel
were talking about something edifying and pious. For Niafer was now a
devout Christian, as became a Countess of Poictesme, and nobody anywhere
entertained a more sincere reverence for solemn noises.

"For instance," Dame Niafer continued, "they tell me that these lovely
speeches of yours have produced such an effect upon the Philistines
yonder that their Queen Stultitia has proffered an alliance, and has
promised to send you light cavalry and battering-rams."

"It is true she has promised to send them, but she has not done so."

"None the less, Manuel, you will find that the moral effect of her
approbation will be invaluable; and, as I so often think, that is the
main thing after all--"

"Yes, yes," says Manuel, impatiently, "we have plenty of moral
approbation and fine speaking here, and in the South we have a saint to
work miracles for us, but it is Asmund who has that army of splendid
reprobates, and they do not value morality and rhetoric the worth of an
old finger-nail."

So the fighting continued throughout that spring, and in Poictesme it
all seemed very important and unexampled, just as wars usually appear to
the people that are engaged in them. Thousands of men were slain, to the
regret of their mothers and sweethearts, and very often of their wives.
And there was the ordinary amount of unparalleled military atrocities
and perfidies and ravishments and burnings and so on, and the endurers
took their agonies so seriously that it is droll to think of how
unimportant it all was in the outcome.

For this especial carnage was of supreme and world-wide significance so
long ago that it is now not worth the pains involved to rephrase f