um--"Obey your
Superiors blindly; serve your Queen, Country, and Regiment to the best
of your ability; keep clean, don't drink, fear God, and--most
important of all--take care of your horse. _Take care of your horse_,
d'ye hear?"

Also the drawled remark of the Adjutant afterwards,
"Ah--what--ah--University?"--his own prompt reply of "Whitechapel,
sir," and the Adjutant's approving "Exactly.... You'll get on here by
good conduct, good riding, and good drill--not by--ah--good accent or
anything else."

How well he remembered the strange depolarized feeling consequent
upon realizing that his whole worldly possessions consisted in three
"grey-back" shirts, two pairs of cotton pants, two pairs of woollen
socks, a towel; a hold-all containing razor, shaving-brush, spoon,
knife and fork, and a button-stick; a cylindrical valise with
hair-brush, clothes-brush, brass-brush, and boot-brushes; a whip,
burnisher, and dandy-brush (all three, for some reason, to be paid for
as part of a "free" kit); jack-boots and jack-spurs, wellington-boots
and swan-neck box-spurs, ammunition boots; a tin of blacking and
another of plate powder; blue, white-striped riding-breeches, blue,
white-striped overalls, drill-suit of blue serge, scarlet tunic,
scarlet stable-jacket, scarlet drill "frock," a pair of trousers of
lamentable cut "authorized for grooming," brass helmet with black
horse-hair plume, blue pill-box cap with white stripe and button,
gauntlets and gloves, sword-belt and pouch-belt, a carbine and a
sword. Also of a daily income of one loaf, butter, tea, and a pound of
meat (often uneatable), and the sum of one shilling and twopence
subject to a deduction of threepence a day "mess-fund," fourpence a
month for delft, and divers others for library, washing, hair-cutting,
barrack-damages, etc.

Yes, it had given one a strange feeling of nakedness, and yet of a
freedom from the tyranny of things, to find oneself so meagrely and
yet so sufficiently endowed.

Then, the strange, lost, homeless feeling that Home is nothing but a
cot and a box in a big bare barrack-room, that the whole of God's wide
Universe contains no private and enclosed spot that is one's own
peculiar place wherein to be alone--at first a truly terrible feeling.

How one envied the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major his Staff
Quarters--without going so far as to envy the great Riding-Master his
real separate and detached house!

No privacy--and a scarlet coat that encarna