from the surrounding country, and were
dangling over fires as the kid and the compressed vegetables bubbled
together; there rose a cheerful clinking of mess tins, outrageous
demands for a "little more stuffin' with that there liver wing," and
gust on gust of chaff as pointed as a bayonet and as delicate as a
gun-butt.

"The boys are in a good temper," said the major. "They'll be singing
presently. Well, a night like this is enough to keep them happy."

Over our heads burned the wonderful Indian stars, which are not all
pricked in on one plane, but preserving an orderly perspective, draw
the eye through the velvet darkness of the void up to the barred doors
of heaven itself. The earth was a gray shadow more unreal than the
sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the pauses between the
howling of the jackals, the movement of the wind in the tamarisks, and
the fitful mutter of musketry fire leagues away to the left. A native
woman in some unseen hut began to sing, the mail train thundered past
on its way to Delhi, and a roosting crow cawed drowsily. Then there
was a belt-loosening silence about the fires, and the even breathing of
the crowded earth took up the story.

The men, full fed, turned to tobacco and song--their officers with
them. Happy is the subaltern who can win the approval of the musical
critics in his regiment, and is honored among the more intricate step
dancers. By him, as by him who plays cricket craftily, will Thomas
Atkins stand in time of need when he will let a better officer go on
alone. The ruined tombs of forgotten Mussulman saints heard the ballad
of "Agra Town," "The Buffalo Battery," "Marching to Cabul," "The long,
long Indian Day," "The Place Where the Punkah Coolie Died," and that
crashing chorus which announces

"Youth's daring spirit, manhood's fire,
Firm hand, and eagle eye
Must be acquire who would aspire
To see the gray boar die."

To-day, of all those jovial thieves who appropriated my commissariat,
and lay and laughed round that water-proof sheet, not one remains.
They went to camps that were not of exercise, and battles without
umpires. Burma, the Soudan, and the frontier fever and fight took them
in their time.

I drifted across to the men's fires in search of Mulvaney, whom I found
greasing his feet by the blaze. There is nothing particularly lovely
in the sight of a private thus engaged after a long day's march, but
when you reflect on the exact