the point of a joke. 'Well, Israel,' says he that January, 'how be the
potatoes getting along?' 'Your honour,' says I, 'like the Apostles
themselves, thirteen to the dozen; and likewise of whom it was said that
many are cold but few are frozen'--hee-hee!"

Nobody smiled. "If you go strainin' yourself over little witticisms like
that," observed young Gunner Oke gloomily, "one of these days you'll be
heving the Dead March played over you before you know what's happenin':
and then, perhaps, you'll laugh on t'other side of your mouth."

Uncle Issy gazed around upon the company. They were eyeing him, one and
all, in deadly earnest, and he crept away. Until that moment he had
carried his years without feeling the burden. He went home, raked
together the embers of the fire over which he had cooked his breakfast,
drew his chair close to the hearth, and sat down to warm himself.
Yes: Sergeant Pengelly had spoken the truth. There _was_ an unnatural
touch of frost in the air this morning.

By and by, when William Henry Phippin's son, Archelaus, bugler to the
corps (aged fifteen), took the whooping-cough, public opinion blamed
Captain Pond no less severely for having enlisted a recruit who was still
an undergraduate in such infantile disorders: and although the poor child
took it in the mildest form, his father (not hitherto remarkable for
parental tenderness) ostentatiously practised the favourite local cure and
conveyed him to and fro for three days and all day long in the ferry-boat
which plied under Captain Pond's windows. The demonstration, which was
conducted in mufti, could not be construed as mutiny; but the spirit which
prompted it, and the public feeling it evoked, galled the worthy Captain
more than he cared to confess.

Still, and when all was said and done, the sweets of notoriety
outflavoured the sours. The Troy Artillery, down the coast, had betrayed
its envy in a spiteful epigram; and this neighbourly acid, infused upon
the pride of Looe, had crystallised it, so to speak, into the name now
openly and defiantly given to the corps. They were the Die-hards
henceforth, jealous of the title and of all that it implied. The ladies
of Looe, with whom Captain Pond (an unmarried man) had ever been a
favourite, used during the next few weeks far severer language towards
their neighbours of Troy than they had ever found for the distant but
imminent Gaul and his lascivious advances.

All this was well enough; bu