, kitchen, sick-wards, etc.
afterwards, with old Sir Patrick Grant and Col. Wadeson, V.C. (Govr.
and Lieut.-Govr.), and a lot of other people.

It is an odd, perhaps a savage, mixture of emotions, to kneel at one's
prayers with some _pride_ under fourteen French flags--_captured_
(including one of Napoleon's while he was still Consul, with a red cap
of Liberty as big as your hat!), and hard by the FIVE bare
staves from which the FIVE standards taken at Blenheim have
rotted to dust!--and then to pass under the great Russian standard
(twenty feet square, I should say!) that is festooned above the door
of the big hall. If Rule Britannia IS humbug--and we are mere
Philistine Braggarts--why doesn't Cook organize a tour to some German
or other city, where we can sit under fourteen captured British
Colours, and be disillusioned once for all!!! Where is the Hospital
whose walls are simply decorated like some Lord Mayor's show with
trophies taken from us and from every corner of the world? (You know
Lady Grant was in the action at Chillianwallah and has the medal?) We
saw two Waterloo men, and Jack was handed about from one old veteran
to another like a toy. "Grow up a brave man," they said, over and over
again. But "The Officer," as he called Colonel Wadeson, was his chief
pride, he being in full uniform and cocked hat!!

And I must tell you--in the sick ward I saw a young man, fair-curled,
broad-chested, whose face seemed familiar. He was with Captain
Cleather at the Aldershot Gym., fell, and is "going home"--slowly, and
with every comfort and kindness about him, but of spinal paralysis.
It _did_ seem hard lines! He was at the Amesbury March Past, and we
had a long chat about it.

* * * * *

July 21, 1882.

* * * * *

I cannot tell you how it pleases me that you liked the bit about
Aldershot in "Laetus." I hope that it must have _grated_ very much if I
had done it badly or out of taste, on any one who knows it as well as
you do; and that its moving your sympathies does mean that I have done
it pretty well. I cannot tell you the pains I expended on it! All
those sentences about the Camp were written in scraps and corrected
for sense and euphony, etc., etc., bit by bit, like "Jackanapes"!!!
Did I tell you about "Tuck of Drum"? Several people who saw the proof,
pitched into me, "Never heard of such an expression." I was convinced
I knew it, and as I said, a