careering pleasantly through grassy meadows and smiling
fields--now basking in the gay sunshine, now lingering in the cool
shade; at one moment hurrying along between rocks and moss-grown
pebbles, brawling, breaking, and foaming; at the next, expanding into
some little lake, calm and deep and mirrorlike.

It is the very chances and changes of conversation, its ups and downs,
its lights and shadows--so like those of life itself--that make its
great charm; and for this, generally, a mixed party gives the only
security. Now, a Mess has very little indeed of this requisite; on
the contrary, its great stronghold is the fact that it offers an easy
tableland for all capacities. It has its little, dry, stale jokes, as
flat and as dull as the orderly book--the regular quiz about Jones's
whiskers, or Tobin's horse; the hackneyed stories about Simpson of
Ours, or Nokes of Yours--of which the major is never tired, and the
newly-joined sub is enraptured. Bless their honest hearts! very little
fun goes far in the army; like the regimental allowance of wine, it will
never intoxicate, and no man is expected to call for a fresh supply.

I have dined at more Messes than any red-coat of them all, at home and
abroad--cavalry, artillery, and infantry, 'horse, foot, and dragoons,'
as Grattan has it. In gala parties, with a general and his staff for
guests; after sweltering field-days, where all the claret could not
clear your throat of pipe-clay and contract-powder; in the colonies,
where flannel-jackets were substituted for regulation coats, and
land-crabs and pepper-pot for saddles and sirloins; in Connemara,
Calcutta, or Corfu--it was all the same: _colum non animum_, etc. Not
but that they had all their little peculiarities among themselves--
so much so, indeed, that I offer a fifty, that, if you set me down
blindfolded at any Mess in the service, I will tell you what corps they
belong to before the cheese appears; and before the bottle goes half
around, I'll engage to distinguish the hussars from the heavies, the
fusiliers from the light-bobs; and when the president is ringing for
more claret, it will go hard with me if I don't make a shrewd guess at
the number of the regiment.

The great charm of the Mess is to those young, ardent spirits fresh from
Sandhurst or Eton, sick of mathematics and bored with false quantities.
To them the change is indeed a glorious one, and I'd ask nothing better
than to be sixteen, and enjoy it all; but