dined the world and made
its wearer feel, as he so often thought, like a live coal glowing
bright in Hell.

Surely the greatest of all an officer's privileges was his right of
mufti, his daily escape from the burning cloth.

"Why does not the British officer wear his uniform always?" writes the
perennial gratuitous ass to the Press, periodically in the Silly
Season.... Dam could tell him.

Memories ...!

Being jerked violently from uneasy slumber and broken, vivid dreams at
5 a.m., by the thunderous banging of the Troop Sergeant's whip on the
table, and his raucous roar of "Tumble out, you lazy swine, before you
get sunstroke! Rise and shine! Rise and shine, you tripe-hounds!" ...
Broken dreams on a smelly, straw-stuffed pillow and lumpy
straw-stuffed pallet, dreams of "_Circle and cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-nge" "On
the Fore-hand, Right About" "Right Pass, Shoulder Out" "Serpentine"
"Order Lance" "Trail Lance" "Right Front Thrust"_ (for the front rank
of the Queen's Greys carry lances); dreams of riding wild mad horses
to unfathomable precipices and at unsurmountable barriers....

Memories ...!

His first experience of "mucking out" stables at five-thirty on a
chilly morning--doing horrible work, horribly clad, feeling horribly
sick. Wheeling away intentionally and maliciously over-piled barrows
to the muck-pits, upsetting them, and being cursed.

Being set to water a notoriously wild and vicious horse, and being
pulled about like a little dog at the end of the chain, burning into
frozen fingers.

Not much of the glamour and glow and glory left!

Better were the interesting and amusing experiences of the
Riding-School where his trained and perfected hands and seat gave him
a tremendous advantage, an early dismissal, and some amelioration of
the roughness of one of the very roughest experiences in a very rough
life.

Even he, though, knew what it was to have serge breeches sticking to
abraided bleeding knees, to grip a stripped saddle with twin
suppurating sores, and to burrow face-first in filthy tan _via_ the
back of a stripped-saddled buck-jumper. How he had pitied some of the
other recruits, making their first acquaintance with the Trooper's
"long-faced chum" under the auspices of a pitiless, bitter-tongued
Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major! _Rough!_ What a character the fellow was!
Never an oath, never a foul word, but what a vocabulary and gift of
invective, sarcasm and cruel stinging reproof! A well-educated man if