‘Nothing of the kind,’ said Harvey, ‘nothing in the least like that. Votes will be put in the ballot-box, and the Mayor will count them—the district councillor will do for the Mayor—and he will say which has received the most votes, and then the two candidates will thank him for presiding, and each will say that the contest has been conducted throughout in the pleasantest and most straightforward fashion, and they part with expressions of mutual esteem. There’s a jolly game for you boys to play. I never had such toys when I was young.’

‘I don’t think we’ll play with them just now,’ said Eric, with an entire absence of the enthusiasm that his uncle had shown; ‘I think perhaps we ought to do a little of our holiday task. It’s history this time; we’ve got to learn up something about the Bourbon period in France.’

‘The Bourbon period,’ said Harvey, with some disapproval in his voice.

‘We’ve got to know something about Louis the Fourteenth,’ continued Eric; ‘I’ve learnt the names of all the principal battles already.’

This would never do. ‘There were, of course, some battles fought during his reign,’ said Harvey, ‘but I fancy the accounts of them were much exaggerated; news was very unreliable in those days, and there were practically no war correspondents, so generals and commanders could magnify every little skirmish they engaged in till they reached the proportions of decisive battles. Louis was really famous, now, as a landscape gardener; the way he laid out Versailles was so much admired that it was copied all over Europe.’

‘Do you know anything about Madame Du Barry?’ asked Eric; ‘didn’t she have her head chopped off?’

‘She was another great lover of gardening,’ said Harvey evasively; ‘in fact, I believe the well-known rose Du Barry was named after her, and now I think you had better play for a little and leave your lessons till later.’

Harvey retreated to the library and spent some thirty or forty minutes in wondering whether it would be possible to compile a history, for use in elementary schools, in which there should be no prominent mention of battles, massacres, murderous intrigues, and violent deaths. The York and Lancaster period and the Napoleonic era would, he admitted to himself, present considerable difficulties, and the Thirty Years’ War would entail something of a gap if you left it out altogether. Still, it would be something gained if, at a highly impressionable age, children could be got to fix their attention on the invention of calico printing instead of the Spanish Armada or the Battle of Waterloo.

It was time, he thought, to go back to the boys’ room, and see how they were getting on with their peace toys. As he stood outside the door he could hear Eric’s voice raised in command; Bertie chimed in now and again with a helpful suggestion.

‘That is Louis the Fourteenth,’ Eric was saying, ‘that one in knee-breeches, that Uncle said invented Sunday schools. It isn’t a bit like him, but it’ll have to do.’

‘We’ll give him a purple coat from my paintbox by and by,’ said Bertie.

‘Yes, and red heels. That is Madame de Maintenon, that one he called Mrs Hemans. She begs Louis not to go on this expedition, but he turns a deaf ear. He takes Marshal Saxe with him, and we must pretend that they have thousands of men with them. The watchword is Qui vive? and the answer is L’état c’est moi—that was one of his favourite remarks, you know. They land at Manchester in the dead of night, and a Jacobite conspirator gives them the keys of the fortress.’

Peeping in through the doorway Harvey observed that the municipal dust-bin had been pierced with holes to accommodate the muzzles of imaginary cannon, and now represented the principal fortified