‘Pretty fair; they might do better,’ said he, as one too well-mannered to make much of an accomplishment in which he had a hand.

‘And you taught them how to do it?’

‘Yes, I taught them.’

‘It must require wonderful practice to get them into the way of beginning and finishing so exactly at one time.  It is like one throat doing it all.  How came you to be a trumpeter, Mr. Loveday?’

‘Well, I took to it naturally when I was a little boy,’ said he, betrayed into quite a gushing state by her delightful interest.  ‘I used to make trumpets of paper, eldersticks, eltrot stems, and even stinging-nettle stalks, you know.  Then father set me to keep the birds off that little barley-ground of his, and gave me an old horn to frighten ’em with.  I learnt to blow that horn so that you could hear me for miles and miles.  Then he bought me a clarionet, and when I could play that I borrowed a serpent, and I learned to play a tolerable bass.  So when I ‘listed I was picked out for training as trumpeter at once.’

‘Of course you were.’

‘Sometimes, however, I wish I had never joined the army.  My father gave me a very fair education, and your father showed me how to draw horses—on a slate, I mean.  Yes, I ought to have done more than I have.’

‘What, did you know my father?’ she asked with new interest.

‘O yes, for years.  You were a little mite of a thing then; and you used to cry when we big boys looked at you, and made pig’s eyes at you, which we did sometimes.