for it, I stood
to watch the fountains playing in Trafalgar Square. My mind was in a
state of moody grandeur, which is both comic and affecting to recall at
this distance of time. I was quite a misunderstood young person, and was
determined to be revenged for it, on all and sundry, myself included.
The blue-coated brass-buttoned old spider who came to weave his web
around me had no need to be elaborate. I closed with him at once, and he
led me with a stealthy seeming of indifference into a back yard, where
he put the statutory questions and handed over the statutory shilling.

I had supposed that I should at once enter upon my military career,
but, to my surprise, I was ordered to report myself at the depot at
St. George's Barracks on the following day at noon. Failing this, I was
instructed that I should be held a rogue and vagabond, and should be
liable to a period of imprisonment I went on to dinner, and bore myself
there with a mysterious gloom, which, as I learned long afterwards, gave
rise to a good deal of conjecture. Next day I was sworn in in a frowsy
back room behind the Westminster Police Court, and learned that I was
now formally bound to the service of her Majesty for a term of twelve
years, my sole hope of escape being the payment of a sum of thirty
pounds as purchase-money.

My military ardour had been a little cooled already at the medical
examination, where, to my horrible embarrassment, I was made to strip
stark naked, and was inspected by an elderly gentleman in a _pince-nez_,
with half a dozen uninterested people looking on, amongst them two or
three louts in fustian who were awaiting their turn. I was put into
a variety of postures, all of which I felt to be ridiculous and
humiliating; and when this ordeal was over there came the swearing-in
and a visit to the depot canteen, where I received payment of a sum of
seven and sixpence and was introduced to some of the raw material of the
fighting forces of the nation.

I may say quite frankly that I did not like the raw material. The young
men who composed it were without exception vulgar and loutish. Their
language was absolutely unreportable, and they were all more or less
flushed with beer. I had been almost a total abstainer all my life, and
though I drank a little of it out of complaisance I thought the canteen
tack the nastiest stuff I had ever tasted The depot barrack-room in
which the recruits slept until the time of their deportation echoed