wolves for a wild-boar's carcass, for a sheep's offal?"

A question which perplexes, very wearily, thinkers who have more time,
more subtlety, and more logic to bring to its unravelment than Bertie
had either leisure or inclination to do.

"Is this true, Rake--that you intentionally commit these freaks of
misconduct to escape promotion?" he asked of the man when he stood alone
with him in his place of confinement.

Rake flushed a little.

"Mischief's bred in me, sir; it must come out! It's just bottled up in
me like ale; if I didn't take the cork out now and then, I should fly
apieces!"

"But many a time when you have been close on the reward of your splendid
gallantry in the field, you have frustrated your own fortunes and the
wishes of your superiors by wantonly proving yourself unfit for the
higher grade they were going to raise you to. Why do you do that?"

Rake fidgeted restlessly, and, to avoid the awkwardness of the question,
replied, like a Parliamentary orator, by a flow of rhetoric.

"Sir, there's a many chaps like me. They can't help nohow busting out
when the fit takes 'em. 'Tain't reasonable to blame 'em for it; they're
just made so, like a chestnut's made to bust its pod, and a chicken to
bust its shell. Well, you see, sir, France, she knows that, and she
says to herself, 'Here are these madcaps; if I keep 'em tight in hand
I shan't do nothing with 'em--they'll turn obstreperous and cram my
convict-cells. Now I want soldiers, I don't want convicts. I can't let
'em stay in the Regulars, 'cause they'll be for making all the army
wildfire like 'em; I'll just draft 'em by theirselves, treat 'em
different, and let 'em fire away. They've got good stuff in 'em, though
too much of the curb riles 'em.' Well, sir, she do that; and aren't the
Zephyrs as fine a lot of fellows as any in the service? Of course
they are; but if they'd been in England--God bless her, the dear old
obstinate soul!--they'd have been drove crazy along o' pipeclay and
razors; she'd never have seed what was in 'em, her eyes are so bunged
up with routine. If a pup riot in the pack, she's no notion but to
double-thong him, and, a-course, in double-quick time, she finds herself
obliged to go further and hang him. She don't ever remember that it may
be only just along of his breeding, and that he may make a very good
hound elseways let out a bit, though he'll spoil the whole pack if she
will be a fool and try to make a steady line-hunter of