t many will
still vividly remember, as one of the most exquisitely portrayed
incidents in the whole of this Reading--the interview between Captain
Taunton and Private Doubledick!

The latter, having passed forty-eight hours in the Black Hole, has been
just summoned, to his great dismay, to the Captain's quarters. Having
about him all the squalor of his incarceration, he shrinks from making
his appearance before one whose silent gaze even was a reproach.
However, not being so mad yet as to disobey orders, he goes up to the
officers' quarters immediately upon his release from the Black Hole,
twisting and breaking in his hands as he goes along a bit of the straw
that had formed its decorative furniture.

"'Come in!'

"Private Doubledick pulled off his cap, took a stride forward and stood
in the light of the dark bright eyes."

From that moment until the end of the interview, the two men alternately
were standing there distinctly before the audience upon the platform.

"Doubledick! do you know where you are going to?"

"To the devil, sir!"

"Yes, and very fast."

Thereupon one did not hear the words simply, one saw it done precisely
as it is described in the original narrative: "Private Richard
Doubledick turned the straw of the Black Hole in his mouth and made a
_miserable_ salute of acquiescence." Captain Taunton then remonstrates
with him thus earnestly: "Doubledick, since I entered his Majesty's
service, a boy of seventeen, I have been pained to see many men of
promise going that road; but I have never been _so_ pained to see a man
determined to make the shameful journey, as I have been, ever since you
joined the regiment, to see _you_." At this point in the printed story,
as it was originally penned, one reads that "Private Richard Doubledick
began to find a film stealing over the floor at which he looked; also to
find the legs of the Captain's breakfast-table turning crooked as if he
saw them through water." Although those words are erased in the reading
copy, and were not uttered, pretty nearly the effect of them was visible
when, after a momentary pause, the disheartened utterance was faltered
out--

"I am only a common soldier, sir. It signifies very little what such a
poor brute comes to."

In answer to the next remonstrance from his officer, Doubledick's words
are blurted out yet more despairingly--

"I hope to get shot soon, sir, and then the regiment, and the world
together, will be rid of me!"