guard, and do sentry-go, and tumble to arms, just as the town dogs leave
off barkin', an' the old gal in the room next yours is startin' to snore
like a Kaffir sow."

Later on, even more was asked of the townie, and he rose to the demand.

The smasher hat was not unbecoming to the manly brow it shaded, when W.
Keyse put it on and anxiously consulted the small greenish swing
looking-glass that graced the chest of drawers, the most commanding
article of furniture in his room at Filliter's Boarding-House. It was Mrs.
Filliter who snored in the room on the other side of the thin partition.
Like the immortal Mrs. Todgers, she was harassed by the demands of her
resident gentlemen in connection with gravy; but, unlike Mrs. Todgers, she
never supplied even browned and heated water as an equivalent. And the
mutton was wonderfully lean, and the fowls, but for difference in size,
might have been ostriches, they were so wiry of muscle, especially as
regarded the legs. A time was to come when Mrs. Filliter was to cook
shrapnel-killed mule and exhausted cavalry charger for her gentlemen, and
when they were to bear up better than most sufferers from this tough and
lasting form of diet, because of not having previously been pampered, as
Mrs. Filliter expressed it, with delicacies and kickshaws.

The bandolier was heavy upon the thin shoulders and hollow chest of a pale
young Cockney, who had drifted down from Southampton in the steerage, and
roared and rattled up from Cape Town by the three foot six inch gauge
railway, eight hundred and seventy miles, to Gueldersdorp, that he might
find his crown of manhood waiting there. The second-hand Sam Browne belt
was distinctly good; the yellow puttees, worn with his own brown lace-up
boots, took trouble to adjust. And it was barely possible, even by
standing the small swing looking-glass on the floor, and tilting it
excessively, to see how one's legs looked. W. Keyse suffered from the
conviction that these limbs were over-thin. Behind the counter of a
fried-fish shop in High Street, Camden Town, serving slabs of browned
hake, and skate, and penn'orths of fried eels and chips to the hungry
customers who surge in tempestuously to be fed on their homeward way from
the Oxford or the Camden Hall of Varieties, or the theatre at the junction
of Gower Street and the Hampstead Road--one develops acuteness of
observation, one gains experience, there being always the bloke who cuts
and runs without payin