its quite as much as he
polished the tops, and considered himself a philosopher. Of whose son he
was he had not the remotest idea; his earliest recollections were of the
tender mercies of the workhouse; but even that chill foster-mother, the
parish, had not damaged the liveliness of his temper or the independence
of his opinions, and as soon as he was fifteen Rake had run away and
joined a circus; distinguishing himself there by his genius for standing
on his head and tying his limbs into a porter's knot.

From the circus he migrated successively into the shape of a comic
singer, a tapster, a navvy, a bill-sticker, a guacho in Mexico (working
his passage out), a fireman in New York, a ventriloquist in Maryland,
a vaquero in Spanish California, a lemonade seller in San Francisco, a
revolutionist in the Argentine (without the most distant idea what he
fought for), a boatman on the bay of Mapiri, a blacksmith in Santarem, a
trapper in the Wilderness, and finally, working his passage home
again, took the Queen's shilling in Dublin, and was drafted into a
light-cavalry regiment. With the --th he served half a dozen years in
India; a rough-rider, a splendid fellow in a charge or a pursuit, with
an astonishing power over horses, and the clearest back-handed sweep of
a saber that ever cut down a knot of natives; but--insubordinate. Do his
duty whenever fighting was in question, he did most zealously; but to
kick over the traces at other times was a temptation that at last became
too strong for that lawless lover of liberty.

From the moment that he joined the regiment a certain Corporal Warne and
he had conceived an antipathy to one another, which Rake had to control
as he might, and which the Corporal was not above indulging in every
petty piece of tyranny that his rank allowed him to exercise. On active
service Rake was, by instinct, too good a soldier not to manage to keep
the curb on himself tolerably well though he was always regarded in his
troop rather as a hound that will "riot" is regarded in the pack; but
when the --th came back to Brighton and to barracks, the evil spirit of
rebellion began to get a little hotter in him under th Corporal's "Idees
Napoliennes" of justifiable persecution. Warne indisputably provoked his
man in a cold, iron, strictly lawful sort of manner, moreover, all the
more irritating to a temper like Rake's.

"Hanged if I care how the officers come it over me; they're gentlemen,
and it don't try