“Don’t you worry about that,” said her mother comfortably, “she’ll manage to keep that on for a good many more years, you’ll see;” and she did, for another twenty.

To the country at large, the Queen was no longer “Our little English rose.” She had become “The Queen-Empress” or “Victoria the Good, the mother of her people.” To the hamlet she was “th’ old Queen,” or, sometimes “th’ poor old Queen,” for was she not a widow? And it was said she was having none too easy a time with that son of hers, either. But they all agreed she was a good Queen, and when asked why, would reply, “Because she’s brought the price of the quartern loaf down” or “Well, we have got peace under her, haven’t we?”

Peace? Of course there was peace. War was something you read about in books, something rather exciting, if only the poor soldiers had not had to be killed, but all long ago and far away, something that could not possibly happen in our time.

But there had been a war not so very long ago, their father told them. He himself had been born on the day of the Battle of Alma. We had been fighting the Russians then, a hard and cruel lot who had thought might was right, but had found themselves mistaken. They couldn’t make slaves of a free people.

Then there was the old man who came round every few months playing a penny whistle and begging. He was known as “One-eyed Peg-leg” because he had lost an eye and part of a leg fighting before Sevastopol. His trouser leg was cut short at the knee, which was supported by what was then called a “wooden leg,” although it did not resemble a human leg very closely, being but a plain wooden stump, tapering slightly at the bottom, where it was finished off by a ferrule. “Dot and carry one,” they called the sound he made when walking.

Laura once heard old Peg-leg telling a neighbour about the loss of his living member. After a hit with a cannon-ball he had lain for twenty-four hours unattended on the battlefield. Then a surgeon had come and, without more ado, had sawn off the shattered portion. “And didn’t I just holler,” he said; “’specially when he dipped the stump into a bucket of boiling tar. That was afore th’ nusses come.”

Before the nurses came. Laura knew what that meant, for there was a picture of Florence Nightingale in a book she had and her mother had read to her about “the Lady with the Lamp,” whose shadow was kissed by the wounded.