eggary in their mouths, and the
British subaltern acts as if he were born to be their victim. There he
is below, of every type, lolling outside the hotel-door that looks on
that Commercial Square which is so thorough a barrack-square, with its
romping children, its dogs, its dust, its guard-house with chatting
soldiers on a form in front, and the important sentinel pacing to and
fro, regular and rigid as a pendulum, keeping vigilant watch and ward
over nothing in particular. We have a rare company to-day; besides the
engineers and bombardiers, and the linesmen of the 24th, 31st, 71st, and
81st, the four infantry regiments on the station, we have men on leave
from Malta. They came up to the races, and are waiting for the P. and O.
steamer to take them back. That fat little customer is your sporting
sub. I only wonder he is not in cords, tops, and spurs. What a hearty
voice he talks in! He asks for the _Field_ as if he were giving a
view-halloo. Then there is the moist-eyed, mottle-cheeked, puffy,
convivial sub, who is knowing on the condition of ale, and is too
friendly with Saccone's sherry. The convivial sub, I am happy to say, is
dying out. Then there is the prig, who is "going in" for his profession.
I call him a prig, because when people are going in for anything they
should have the good sense not to blow about it. To hear Mr. Shells and
his prattle about Hamley and Brialmont and Jomini, _kriegspiel_ and the
new drill, you would imagine he was bound to put the extinguisher on
Marlborough, Wellington, Wolseley, and the rest of them; and yet the
chances are, if you meet him twenty years hence, he will be a captain on
the recruiting service, with no forces to marshal but six growing
children. Then there is the sentimental sub, the perfect ladies' man,
who plays croquet and the flute, pleads guilty to having cultivated the
Nine, and affects a simpering pooh-pooh when he is impeached with having
inspired that wicked but so witty bit of scandal in the local paper. By
singularity of pairing, his fast friend is the muscular sub, who walks
against time, and can write his initials with a hundredweight hanging
from his index-finger.

Happy dogs in the heyday of life, all of them; how I envy them their
buoyant spirits, their rollicking enjoyment of to-day, and their
contempt for the morrow! But the morrow will come nevertheless, and
with it Black Care will come often. Gib is a haunt of the Hebrews; they
or their myrmidons bese