OF KRISHNA MULVANEY

Wohl auf, my bully cavaliers
We ride to church to-day,
The man that hasn't got a horse
Must steal one straight away.
. . . . .
Be reverent, men, remember
This is a Gottes haus
Du, Conrad, cut along der aisle
And schenck der whisky aus.

_Hans Breitmann's Ride to Church._

Once upon a time, very far from England, there lived three men who
loved each other so greatly that neither man nor woman could come
between them. They were in no sense refined, nor to be admitted to the
outer-door mats of decent folk, because they happened to be private
soldiers in Her Majesty's Army; and private soldiers of our service
have small time for self-culture. Their duty is to keep themselves and
their accoutrements specklessly clean, to refrain from getting drunk
more often than is necessary, to obey their superiors, and to pray
for a war. All these things my friends accomplished; and of their own
motion threw in some fighting-work for which the Army Regulations did
not call. Their fate sent them to serve in India, which is not a
golden country, though poets have sung otherwise. There men die with
great swiftness, and those who live suffer many and curious things. I
do not think that my friends concerned themselves much with the social
or political aspects of the East. They attended a not unimportant war
on the northern frontier, another one on our western boundary, and a
third in Upper Burma. Then their regiment sat still to recruit, and
the boundless monotony of cantonment life was their portion. They were
drilled morning and evening on the same dusty parade-ground. They
wandered up and down the same stretch of dusty white road, attended
the same church and the same grog-shop, and slept in the same
lime-washed barn of a barrack for two long years. There was Mulvaney,
the father in the craft, who had served with various regiments from
Bermuda to Halifax, old in war, scarred, reckless, resourceful, and in
his pious hours an unequalled soldier. To him turned for help and
comfort six and a half feet of slow-moving, heavy-footed Yorkshireman,
born on the wolds, bred in the dales, and educated chiefly among the
carriers' carts at the back of York railway-station. His name was
Learoyd, and his chief virtue an unmitigated patience which helped him
to win fights. How Ortheris, a fox-terrier of a Cockney, ever came to
be one of the trio, is a