elders expounded the whole duty of man in the Army.

"I've had to cut the service," said the Infant; "but that's no reason
why my vast stores of experience should be lost to posterity." He was
just thirty, and in that same summer an imperious wire drew me to his
baronial castle: "Got good haul; ex _Tamar_. Come along."

It was an unusually good haul, arranged with a single eye to my benefit.
There was a baldish, broken-down captain of Native Infantry, shivering
with ague behind an indomitable red nose--and they called him Captain
Dickson. There was another captain, also of Native Infantry, with a fair
mustache; his face was like white glass, and his hands were fragile, but
he answered joyfully to the cry of Tertius. There was an enormously
big and well-kept man, who had evidently not campaigned for years,
clean-shaved, soft-voiced, and cat-like, but still Abanazar for all that
he adorned the Indian Political Service; and there was a lean Irishman,
his face tanned blue-black with the suns of the Telegraph Department.
Luckily the baize doors of the bachelors' wing fitted tight, for we
dressed promiscuously in the corridor or in each other's rooms, talking,
calling, shouting, and anon waltzing by pairs to songs of Dick Four's
own devising.

There were sixty years of mixed work to be sifted out between us,
and since we had met one another from time to time in the quick
scene-shifting of India--a dinner, camp, or a race-meeting here; a
dak-bungalow or railway station up country somewhere else--we had never
quite lost touch. Infant sat on the banisters, hungrily and enviously
drinking it in. He enjoyed his baronetcy, but his heart yearned for the
old days.

It was a cheerful babel of matters personal, provincial, and imperial,
pieces of old call-over lists, and new policies, cut short by the roar
of a Burmese gong, and we went down not less than a quarter of a mile of
stairs to meet Infant's mother, who had known us all in our school-days
and greeted us as if those had ended a week ago. But it was
fifteen years since, with tears of laughter, she had lent me a gray
princess-skirt for amateur theatricals.

That was a dinner from the "Arabian Nights," served in an eighty-foot
hall full of ancestors and pots of flowering roses, and, what was more
impressive, heated by steam. When it was ended and the little mother had
gone away--("You boys want to talk, so I shall say good-night now")--we
gathered about an apple-wood fire,