eight-cloths are breaking his heart."

Life's Handicap.

When I was telling you of the joke that The Worm played off on the
Senior Subaltern, I promised a somewhat similar tale, but with all the
jest left out. This is that tale:

Dicky Hatt was kidnapped in his early, early youth--neither by
landlady's daughter, housemaid, barmaid, nor cook, but by a girl so
nearly of his own caste that only a woman could have said she was just
the least little bit in the world below it. This happened a month
before he came out to India, and five days after his one-and-twentieth
birthday. The girl was nineteen--six years older than Dicky in the
things of this world, that is to say--and, for the time, twice as
foolish as he.

Excepting, always, falling off a horse there is nothing more fatally
easy than marriage before the Registrar. The ceremony costs less than
fifty shillings, and is remarkably like walking into a pawn-shop. After
the declarations of residence have been put in, four minutes will
cover the rest of the proceedings--fees, attestation, and all. Then the
Registrar slides the blotting-pad over the names, and says grimly, with
his pen between his teeth:--"Now you're man and wife;" and the couple
walk out into the street, feeling as if something were horribly illegal
somewhere.

But that ceremony holds and can drag a man to his undoing just
as thoroughly as the "long as ye both shall live" curse from the
altar-rails, with the bridesmaids giggling behind, and "The Voice that
breathed o'er Eden" lifting the roof off. In this manner was Dicky Hatt
kidnapped, and he considered it vastly fine, for he had received an
appointment in India which carried a magnificent salary from the Home
point of view. The marriage was to be kept secret for a year. Then Mrs.
Dicky Hatt was to come out and the rest of life was to be a glorious
golden mist. That was how they sketched it under the Addison Road
Station lamps; and, after one short month, came Gravesend and Dicky
steaming out to his new life, and the girl crying in a thirty-shillings
a week bed-and-living room, in a back street off Montpelier Square near
the Knightsbridge Barracks.

But the country that Dicky came to was a hard land, where "men" of
twenty-one were reckoned very small boys indeed, and life was expensive.
The salary that loomed so large six thousand miles away did not go far.
Particularly when Dicky divided it by two, and remitt