He peered out of the window.

"It's sunny," he said for the twelfth time.

"I couldn't ha' had better weather." And then for the first time it dawned upon him that there were novel disproportions in the world.

"Lord sakes," he cried, sitting up and looking animated for the first time, "but them's mortal great thissels growing out there on the bank by that broom.

If so be they _be_ thissels?
Or 'ave I been forgetting ?" But they were thistles, and what he took for tall bushes of broom was the new grass, and amidst these things a company of British soldiers--red-coated as ever--was skirmishing in accordance with the directions of the drill book that had been partially revised after the Boer War.