get them to postpone
the finish till the morning. That night Dam dreamed his dream and, on
the morrow, behind the Riding-School, and in fifteen rounds, became,
by common consent, champion bruiser of the Queen's Greys--by no
ambition of his own.

And so--as has been said--Trooper Henry Hawker ungrudgingly referred
Trooper Phelim O'Shaughnessy to him in the matter of reducing the
pride of the Young Jock who had dared to "desthroy" a dragoon.

Trooper Phelim O'Shaughnessy--in perfect-fitting glove-tight scarlet
stable-jacket (that never went near a stable, being in fact the smart
shell-jacket, shaped like an Eton coat, sacred to "walking-out"
purposes), dark blue overalls with broad white stripe, strapped over
half-wellington boots adorned with glittering swan-neck spurs, a
pill-box cap with white band and button, perched jauntily on three
hairs--also looked what he was, the ideal heavy-cavalry man, the
swaggering, swashbuckling trooper, _beau sabreur_, good all round and
all through....

The room in which these worthies and various others (varying also in
dress, from shirt and shorts to full review-order for Guard) had their
being, expressed the top note and last cry--or the lowest note and
deepest groan--of bleak, stark utilitarianism. Nowhere was there hint
or sign of grace and ornament. Bare deal-plank floor, bare
white-washed walls, plank and iron truckle beds, rough plank and iron
trestle tables, rough plank and iron benches, rough plank and iron
boxes clamped to bedsteads, all bore the same uniform impression of
useful ugliness, ugly utility. The apologist in search of a solitary
encomium might have called it clean--save around the hideous closed
stove where muddy boots, coal-dust, pipe-dottels, and the bitter-end
of five-a-penny "gaspers"[18] rebuked his rashness.

A less inviting, less inspiring, less home-like room for human
habitation could scarce be found outside a jail. Perhaps this was the
less inappropriate in that a jail it was, to a small party of its
occupants--born and bred to better things.

The eye was grateful even for the note of cheer supplied by the red
cylindrical valise on the shelf above each cot, and by the occasional
scarlet tunic and stable-jacket. But for these it had been, to the
educated eye, an even more grim, grey, depressing,
beauty-and-joy-forsaken place than it was....

Dam (_alias_ Trooper D. Matthewson) placed the gleaming helmet upon
his callous straw-stuffed pillow, carefu