no more arrest themselves, than the feather-weight
can pull in the lightning-stride of the two-year-old, who defies all
check, and takes the flat as he chooses. They are brought up like young
dauphins, and tossed into the costly whirl to float as best they can--on
nothing. Then on the lives and deaths that follow; on the graves where a
dishonoured alien lies forgotten by the dark Austrian lake-side, or
under the monastic shadow of some crumbling Spanish crypt; where a red
cross chills the lonely traveller in the virgin solitudes of Amazonian
forest aisles, or the wild scarlet creepers of Australia trail over a
nameless mound above the trackless stretch of sun-warmed waters--then,
at them the world

"Shoots out its lips with scorn."

Not on _them_ lies the blame.

* * *

His influence had done more to humanise the men he was associated with
than any preachers or teachers could have done.

Almost insensibly they grew ashamed to be beaten by him, and strove to
do like him as far as they could. They never knew him drunk, they never
heard him swear, they never found him unjust, even to a poverty-stricken
_indigene_, or brutal, even to a _fille de joie_. Insensibly his
presence humanised them. Of a surety, the last part Bertie dreamed of
playing was that of a teacher to any mortal thing. Yet--here in
Africa--it might reasonably be questioned if a second Augustine or
Francois Xavier would ever have done half the good among the
devil-may-care Roumis that was wrought by the dauntless, listless,
reckless soldier, who followed instinctively the one religion which has
no cant in its brave, simple creed, and binds man to man in links that
are as true as steel--the religion of a gallant gentleman's loyalty and
honour.

* * *

The child had been flung upward, a little straw floating in the gutter
of Paris iniquities; a little foam-bell, bubbling on the sewer waters of
barrack vice; the stick had been her teacher, the baggage-waggon her
cradle, the camp-dogs her playfellows, the _caserne_ oaths her lullaby,
the _guidons_ her sole guiding-stars, the _razzia_ her sole fete-day: it
was little marvel that the bright, bold, insolent little friend of the
flag had nothing left of her sex save a kitten's mischief and coquette's
archness. It said much rather for the straight, fair, sunlit instincts
of the untaught nature, that Cigarette had gleaned, even out of such a
life, two virtues that she w