al, and you may be tempted to follow suit. Now so long as you
keep within your allowance, and I haven't stinted you there, stick to
the Line, the whole Line, and nothing but the Line. Be careful how you
back another young fool's bill, and if you fall in love with a woman
twenty years older than yourself, don't tell me about it, that's all.'

With these counsels, and many others equally valuable, did Papa Wick
fortify Bobby ere that last awful night at Portsmouth when the Officers'
Quarters held more inmates than were provided for by the Regulations,
and the liberty-men of the ships fell foul of the drafts for India, and
the battle raged from the Dockyard Gates even to the slums of Longport,
while the drabs of Fratton came down and scratched the faces of the
Queen's Officers.

Bobby Wick, with an ugly bruise on his freckled nose, a sick and shaky
detachment to manuvre in ship, and the comfort of fifty scornful females
to attend to, had no time to feel home-sick till the Malabar reached
mid-Channel, when he doubled his emotions with a little guard-visiting
and a great many other matters.

The Tail Twisters were a most particular Regiment. Those who knew them
least said that they were eaten up with 'side.' But their reserve and
their internal arrangements generally were merely protective diplomacy.
Some five years before, the Colonel commanding had looked into the
fourteen fearless eyes of seven plump and juicy subalterns who had all
applied to enter the Staff Corps, and had asked them why the three
stars should he, a colonel of the Line, command a dashed nursery for
double-dashed bottle-suckers who put on condemned tin spurs and rode
qualified mokes at the hiatused heads of forsaken Black Regiments. He
was a rude man and a terrible. Wherefore the remnant took measures
[with the half-butt as an engine of public opinion] till the rumour
went abroad that young men who used the Tail Twisters as a crutch to the
Staff Corps had many and varied trials to endure. However, a regiment
had just as much right to its own secrets as a woman.

When Bobby came up from Deolali and took his' place among the Tail
Twisters, it was gently but firmly borne in upon him that the Regiment
was his father and his mother and his indissolubly wedded wife, and
that there was no crime under the canopy of heaven blacker than that
of bringing shame on the Regiment, which was the best-shooting,
best-drilled, best-set-up, bravest, most illustrious, and