in a gigantic polished steel grate,
under a mantel-piece ten feet high, and the Infant compassed us about
with curious liqueurs and that kind of cigarette which serves best to
introduce your own pipe.

"Oh, bliss!" grunted Dick Four from a sofa, where he had been packed
with a rug over him. "First time I've been warm since I came home."

We were all nearly on top of the fire, except Infant, who had been long
enough at home to take exercise when he felt chilled. This is a grisly
diversion, but much affected by the English of the Island.

"If you say a word about cold tubs and brisk walks," drawled McTurk,
"I'll kill you, Infant. I've got a liver, too. 'Member when we used
to think it a treat to turn out of our beds on a Sunday
morning--thermometer fifty-seven degrees if it was summer--and bathe off
the Pebbleridge? Ugh!"

"'Thing I don't understand," said Tertius, "was the way we chaps used to
go down into the lavatories, boil ourselves pink, and then come up with
all our pores open into a young snow-storm or a black frost. Yet none of
our chaps died, that I can remember."

"Talkin' of baths," said McTurk, with a chuckle, "'member our bath in
Number Five, Beetle, the night Rabbits-Eggs rocked King? What wouldn't
I give to see old Stalky now! He is the only one of the two Studies not
here."

"Stalky is the great man of his Century," said Dick Four.

"How d'you know?" I asked.

"How do I know?" said Dick Four, scornfully. "If you've ever been in a
tight place with Stalky you wouldn't ask."

"I haven't seen him since the camp at Pindi in '87," I said. "He was
goin' strong then--about seven feet high and four feet through."

"Adequate chap. Infernally adequate," said Tertius, pulling his mustache
and staring into the fire.

"Got dam' near court-martialed and broke in Egypt in '84," the Infant
volunteered. "I went out in the same trooper with him--as raw as he was.
Only _I_ showed it, and Stalky didn't."

"What was the trouble?" said McTurk, reaching forward absently to twitch
my dress-tie into position.

"Oh, nothing. His colonel trusted him to take twenty Tommies out to
wash, or groom camels, or something at the back of Suakin, and Stalky
got embroiled with Fuzzies five miles in the interior. He conducted a
masterly retreat and wiped up eight of 'em. He knew jolly well he'd
no right to go out so far, so he took the initiative and pitched in a
letter to his colonel, who was frothing at the mouth, complaining