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HIS PRIVATE HONOUR.

THE autumn batch of recruits for the Old Regiment had just been uncarted. As usual they were said to be the worst draft that had ever come from the Depôt. Mulvaney looked them over, grunted scornfully, and immediately reported himself very sick.

'Is it the regular autumn fever?' said the doctor, who knew something of Terence's ways. 'Your temperature's normal.'

"Tis a hundred and thirty-seven rookies to the bad, sorr. I'm not very sick now, but I will be dead if these boys are thrown at me in my rejuced condition. Doctor, dear, supposin' you was in charge of three cholera camps an'

'Go to hospital then, you old contriver,' said the doctor laughing.

Terence bundled himself into a blue bedgown,— Dinah Shadd was away attending to a major's lady, who preferred Dinah without a diploma to anybody else with a hundred-put a pipe in his teeth, and paraded the hospital balcony exhorting Ortheris to be a father to the new recruits.

Copyright, 1891, by Macmillan & Co.

'They're mostly your own sort, little man,' he said with a grin; 'the top-spit av Whitechapel. I'll interogue them whin they're more like something they niver will be,-an' that's a good honist soldier like me.'

Ortheris yapped indignantly. He knew as well as Terence what the coming work meant, and he thought Terence's conduct mean. Then he strolled off to look at the new cattle, who were staring at the unfamiliar landscape with large eyes, and asking if the kites were eagles and the pariah-dogs jackals.

'Well, you are a holy set of bean-faced beggars, you are,' he said genially to a knot in the barrack square. Then running his eye over them,- Fried fish an' whelks is about your sort. Blimy if they haven't sent some pink-eyed Jews too. You chap with the greasy 'ed, which o' the Solomons was your father, Moses ?'

"My name's Anderson,' said a voice sullenly.

'Oh, Samuelson!

All right, Samuelson! An' how many o' the likes o' you Sheenies are comin' to spoil B. Company?'

There is no scorn so complete as that of the old soldier for the new. It is right that this should be so. A recruit must learn first that he is not a man but a thing, which in time, and by the mercy of Heaven, may develop into a soldier of the Queen if it takes care and attends to good advice. Ortheris's tunic was open, his cap overlopped one eye, and his hands were

behind his back as he walked round growing more contemptuous at each step. The recruits did not dare to answer, for they were new boys in a strange school, who had called themselves soldiers at the Depôt in comfortable England.

'Not a single pair o' shoulders in the whole lot. I've seen some bad drafts in my time,—some bloomin' bad drafts; but this 'ere draft beats any draft I've ever known. Jock, come an' look at these squidgy, ham-shanked beggars.'

Learoyd was walking across the square. He arrived slowly, circled round the knot as a whale circles round a shoal of small fry, said nothing, and went away whistling.

'Yes, you may well look sheepy,' Ortheris squeaked to the boys. 'It's the likes of you breaks the 'earts of the likes of us. We've got to lick you into shape, and never a ha'penny extry do we get for so doin', and you ain't never grateful neither. Don't you go thinkin' it's the Colonel nor yet the company orf'cer that makes you. It's me, you Johnnie Raws -you Johnnie bloomin' Raws!'

A company officer had come up unperceived behind Ortheris at the end of this oration. You may be right, Ortheris,' he said quietly, 'but I shouldn't shout it.' The recruits grinned as Ortheris saluted and collapsed.

Some days afterwards I was privileged to look over the new batch, and they were everything that

Ortheris had said, and more. B. Company had been devastated by forty or fifty of them; and B. Company's drill on parade was a sight to shudder at. Ortheris asked them lovingly whether they had not been sent out by mistake, and whether they had not better post themselves back to their friends. Learoyd thrashed them methodically one by one, without haste but without slovenliness; and the older soldiers took the remnants from Learoyd and went over them in their own fashion. Mulvaney stayed in hospital, and grinned from the balcony when Ortheris called him a shirker and other worse

names.

we'll brew men av them 'Be vartuous an' parse

'By the grace av God yet,' Terence said one day. vere, me son. There's the makin's av colonels in that mob if we only go deep enough-wid a belt.'

'We!' Ortheris replied, dancing with rage. ‘I just like you and your "we's." 'Ere's B. Company drillin' like a drunk Militia reg❜ment.'

'So I've been officially acquent,' was the answer from on high; 'but I'm too sick this tide to make certain,'

'An' you, you fat Hirishman, shiftin' and shirkin' up there among the arrerroot an' the sago.'

'An' the port wine,-you've forgot the port wine, Orth'ris; it's none so bad.' Terence smacked his lips. provokingly.

'And we're wore off our feet with these 'ere,

kangaroos. Come out o' that, an' earn your pay. Come on down outer that, an' do somethin' 'stead o' grinnin' up there like a Jew monkey, you frowsy'eaded Fenian.'

'When I'm better av my various complaints I'll have a little private talkin' wid you. In the meanwhile,-duck!'

Terence flung an empty medicine bottle at Ortheris's head and dropped into a long chair, and Ortheris came to tell me his opinion of Mulvaney three times over,-each time entirely varying all the words.

'There'll be a smash one o' these days,' he concluded. Well, it's none o' my fault, but it's 'ard on

B. Company.'

It was very hard on B. Company, for twenty seasoned men cannot push twice that number of fools into their places and keep their own places at the same time. The recruits should have been more evenly distributed through the regiment, but it seemed good to the Colonel to mass them in a company where there was a large proportion of old soldiers. He found his reward early one morning when the battalion was advancing by companies in echelon from the right. The order was given to form company squares, which are compact little bricks of men, very unpleasant for a line of charging cavalry to deal with. B. Company was on the left flank, and had ample time to know what was

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