artist would be at him at
once. He is the living image of what one imagines Brian de Bois Guilbert
to have been. An inch or two over six feet high, his figure, spare but
lengthy and muscular, has been so knocked about (by hunting and polo
accidents) that it has rather a lopsided look, and he leans slightly to
one side as he walks, but this does not interfere with his strength and
activity nor detract from the distinguished and particularly graceful
look of the man. His face, like Driscoll's, is sun-blackened rather than
sun-browned; its general expression stern and grim, and when he is
thinking and talking about the Boers (he talks about them just as Bois
Guilbert did about the Saracens) this expression deepens into something
positively savage, and he looks, and can perhaps sometimes be, a
relentless enemy. But this is only half the man. In ordinary talk he is
quite different. He has the Celtic sensitiveness and humour. He is an
artist. His manner among friends is extraordinarily winning and
sympathetic, and his grave melancholy face has a way of breaking into a
most infectious laugh. Altogether, what with his tall person, dark
determined face, his fierceness and gentleness, and the general air of
the devil about him, you are not surprised to find that no soldier's
name is more common in men's mouths out here than Mike Rimington's. You
might fit Marmion's lines to him well enough--

"His square-turned joints and length of limb
Show him no carpet knight so trim,
But in close fight a warrior grim."

He ought to have lived five hundred years ago and dressed in chain-mail
and led out his lances to plunder and foray. As it is he does his best
even in the nineteenth century. Picturesque is the word that best
describes him. He makes every one else look hopelessly commonplace. His
men admire him immensely, like him a good deal, and fear him a little.
Generals in command sometimes find him, I fancy, a bit of a handful,
that is, if their policy is at all a backward one. But most people watch
him and talk of him with a certain interest, and whatever their opinions
or ideas of him may be, one feels sure that none who have once met will
easily forget him.

He is essentially a man who means business, who believes that the army
is here to fight, and it is especially in action that he makes his value
felt. Then, when he leads his squadron and the rifles begin to speak,
and the first few shots come one by one like the fir