entional kit. The recruit was not accustomed to hear himself
addressed in this manner, and his earliest impulse was to hit the pug
nose of the person who accosted him, but he remembered himself in time,
and bethinking him of the wise man's saying, that a soft answer turneth
away wrath, he asked meekly where he should go. Then the Sergeant, who
was so straitly trousered and jacketted that he pranced in his going,
ordered him to follow his nose, adding that if he conventionally well
supposed that because a conventional General in a conventional carriage
came to see him off, he was entitled to shirk his conventional duties,
he was conventionally well in error.

'I say, Sergeant,' said Polson, turning to face his conductor, 'that's a
filthy bad habit. If you want to be respected, drop it.'

The Sergeant went as scarlet as his stable-jacket, and said that any
conventional recruit had conventionally well _got_ to respect _him_ any
conventional how.

'My dear sir, no,' said Polson. 'It's quite impossible to respect a man
who talks like a foul-mouthed parrot.'

The Sergeant walked like a man astounded and said no more, and Polson
likewise held his peace. They were both quietly businesslike whilst
Polson got his kit served out to him, and by the time this work was
over, the dinner hour had arrived. He was told off to a mess in a long
barrack-room, in which his brother recruits were quartered, under the
charge of an old soldier. Some of these new comrades were fresh from the
plough, and some were the rowdy refuse of the town; one wore a miner's
flannels, and another was a weedy youth from a shop-counter, who had a
higher opinion of himself than others were likely to form.

The speech of every man jack of them was like the exhalation of a
cesspool, and the newest of Her Majesty's hired servants sat in a
grim wrath and loathing, seeing that he had chosen these for his life
companions. The meal was plentiful, and not bad of its kind, but it was
dirtily served, and asked for long custom or an appetite of more than
average keenness. Our recruit had neither the one nor the other, but
he remembered his promise to Irene. He had undertaken to meet his
fate cheerfully, and the fare was part of his fate. He would have no
re-pinings. The food was honest and wholesome, and he would probably
learn to be eager for worse before the war was over. So he, as it were,
squared his shoulders at his trencher, and was just ready to fall to,
when on