He brought a toy soldier to breakfast. Napoleon it was, from his father’s set of soldiers back in Mogilev. He had put it in his pocket before leaving. I sat in the booth, opposite the Tsarevitch, and he stood his small Napoleon on the table, facing out at the land which that emperor had never been able to conquer. It was all birch trees in sight then, a forest of winter trees.

I told him I too had my father’s Napoleon, a figure cast in lead, around the same size, though it did not have its full complement of paint by my time.

He looked all puzzled and said, ‘But how can that be? My father’s was the first such set in Russia, and others based upon it. Your father’s set would be much older.’

I told him my father’s set was not at all like his, with the exception of the Napoleon. It seemed a good opportunity for a story, so I made it one. I wanted to fill his time, so there was not too much worry in his head. I made that the business of the day.

I told him my father’s soldiers came from a time when my grandfather, like the Tsarevitch’s, had been a kind of head of state, though that had been of the short-lived Republic of Madawaska. The notion of a short-lived republic had him thinking immediately that there had been some kind of revolution, with my grandfather caught up in it. This was natural for the boy, I suppose, in his situation, and it was the last thing I should have got him thinking.

Quick as I could, I turned it into a story of a negotiation, and the settlement of it a decade later, the fixing of the boundary between Maine and the British territory of New Brunswick, in the smallest of all wars, the Aroostook War, in which the only death in conflict was a pig caught in crossfire. That notion amused him, that an altercation might be called a war but might have killed only a pig.

From there, I could safely return us to the topic of toy soldiers.

You told him the story of your father’s toy soldiers?

Yes. Yes, I did. They were made for my father, all but one of them, by my grandfather John Baker, in 1828, when my father was three years old and my grandfather held by the British in Fredericton jail for refusal to pay – on a matter of principle – a fine. He had been granted land by the state of Maine, only to discover it was claimed by the British for New Brunswick and Lower Canada. He petitioned Maine to assert the claim he believed it had over the territory. He obstructed the British constable when the constable came to Madawaska, and he told him he had no jurisdiction.