t Woolwich, which he entered as a cadet at fifteen,
it was just the same. He was continually defying, in a good-humoured
way, those who were set over him, and more than once he had a very
narrow escape of having his career cut short by dismissal.

At this period his father held the appointment of director of the
carriage department of the Arsenal, and his whole family suffered
greatly from the plague of mice which overran the house they lived in.
After putting up with it for some time, Charles and his brother Henry,
also a cadet, laid traps and caught vast numbers of the mice, and during
the night they carried them stealthily across the road in baskets to the
commandant's house, exactly opposite. Opening a door which they felt
pretty sure of finding unlocked, they emptied the baskets one by one,
and let the mice run where they would. Then the boys crept back softly
to their own room, shaking with laughter at the thought of the
commandant's face when he came down in the morning.

The two youths were great favourites with the workmen in the Arsenal,
who used often to leave off the work they should have been doing to make
squirts, crossbows, and other weapons for Charles and Henry. They must
have trembled sometimes when they heard that the windows of the
storehouse had been mysteriously broken, or that an officer who was
known to be disliked by the cadets had received a deluge of water down
his neck from a hedge bordering the road. But the culprits never
betrayed each other, and the young Gordons soon grew so bold that they
thought they might venture on a piece of mischief which very nearly
ended their military career.

Some earthworks had been newly thrown up near a room where the senior
cadets, known as 'Pussies,' attended lectures on certain evenings in the
week. One night the two Gordons hid themselves behind this rampart, and
while listening to remarks upon fortification and strategy the cadets
were startled by a crash of glass and a shower of small shot falling
about their ears. In an instant they were all up and out of the house,
dashing about in the direction from which the shots had come; and so
quick were they that if Charles and Henry had not known every inch of
the ground and dodged their pursuers, they would certainly have been
caught and expelled, as they richly deserved.

* * * * *

In June 1852 Charles Gordon was given a commission as second lieutenant
in the Engineers, a