The place is so small that when you are up in the air it
looks as if you might as well try to drop on a pin's point. But after
all, it was a nothing--a mere nothing, gentlemen, I assure you. Any one
of you could have done the same."
Every one in the room was delighted, not less with the captain's
gallantry than with his modesty. Many moving stories of his escapes were
retailed. Josiah listened with enthralled attention to an adventure
which, it seems, the captain had had in Spain, and which Josiah's
companion (a bald-headed gentleman with spectacles) narrated with great
effect. Mulberry in one of the marches of the Carlists, to whom he had
attached himself, was surprised and taken prisoner by the enemy. They
locked him in the kitchen of a farmhouse near, mentioning incidentally
that in the morning they would shoot him. They took away his sword and
pistols; and would have taken his umbrella, but the captain pleaded hard
for its society, declaring that from early boyhood he had never been
able to sleep without an umbrella under his pillow. The Spaniards had
heard much of the eccentricity of Englishmen, and not being inclined to
refuse the request of a doomed man, they left him the umbrella.
The next morning, when they came to take him out for shooting purposes,
lo! the captain and the umbrella were both gone.
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