dle a sabre or a
gun, or how to balance himself in the goose-step--matters which he had
taken the pains to master long ago--there were still certain things to
learn, and the button stick, and the flat and chain burnish, and the
pots of chrome yellow, and blacking, and pipeclay, were just as strange
to him as they would have been to any other raw recruit; so that he
was teaching his business at one end and learning it at the other for a
matter of some four or five days.

There was a poor exile of Erin in the shape of an impecunious Irish
nobleman, who enlisted on the same day with Polson and whose uniform was
tried on in the same hour.

They were in the tailor's shop together with a hurried Sergeant standing
over them.

The aristocratic Paddy pulled on his trousers with a heavy sigh.

'The livery,' said he, 'of me degradation.'

'It is the Queen's uniform,' said Polson, 'and you have a right to be
proud to wear it.'

The child of Erin buttoned his stable jacket and went out to drill, and
Polson gave him a purposed double dose of labour. He had given orders to
an individual man here and there, but until he became a dragoon he had
never commanded a crowd, and there is something in that which makes
either a man or a sweep of the commander. Polson was all alert, eager to
teach what he knew to the slow and loutish squad before him; but on that
first morning of his wearing the Queen's cloth, keen as he was upon
his own business, he could not help recognising a certain pair of
flea-bitten greys which swept through the barrack gate whilst he was at
work some fifty yards away. They came from the Bar-field Arms, and he
had helped the man who now drove them in their breaking, four or five
years ago.

There was a cry of 'Guard, tarn out!' and a clash of salute as the
carriage rolled through the gates without a challenge, and the man who
sat at the back, disdaining the cushions, and with a lustrous silk
hat cocked over one eyebrow, was his father. John Jervase came into
barracks, as he had gone everywhere throughout his life, with a
magnificent impudence, and he distributed salutes to all and sundry from
a majestic forefinger; whilst his only son watched him with a sardonic
eye as he bowled up to the officers' quarters.

The card of Mr. John Jervase was carried to Colonel Stacey, and Colonel
Stacey was ready to receive Mr. Jervase in a flash.

'I am told, sir,' said Mr. Jervase, in that bluff, John-Bull way of his,
which