most graceful, the most truly elegant, of all military
types. The little riflemen, the common soldiers, have an extremely
useful and durable aspect: with their plain black uniforms, little
black Scotch bonnets, black gloves, total absence of color, they
suggest the rigidly practical and business-like phase of their
profession--the restriction of the attention to the simple specialty
of "picking off" one's enemy. The officers are of course more elegant,
but their elegance is sober and subdued. They are dressed all in
black, save for a broad, dark crimson sash which they wear across the
shoulder and chest, and for a very slight hint of gold lace upon their
small, round, short-visored caps. They are furthermore adorned with a
small quantity of broad black braid discreetly applied to their tight,
long-skirted surtouts. There is a kind of severe gentlemanliness about
this costume which, when it is worn by a tall, slim, neat-waisted
young Englishman with a fresh complexion, a candid eye and a yellow
moustache, is of quite irresistible effect. There is no such triumph
of taste as to look rich without high colors and picturesque without
accessories. The imagination is always struck by the figure of a
soberly-dressed gentleman with a sword.

The little riflemen, the Hussars, the Life Guards, the Foot Guards,
the artillerymen (whose garments always look stiffer and more
awkwardly fitted than those of their _confreres_) have all, however,
one quality in common--the appearance of extreme, of even excessive,
youth. It is hardly too much to say that the British army, as a
stranger observes it now-a-days, is an army of boys. All the regiments
are boyish: they are made up of lads who range from seventeen to
five-and-twenty. You look almost in vain for the old-fashioned
specimen of the British soldier--the large, well-seasoned man of
thirty, bronzed and whiskered beneath his terrible bearskin and with
shoulders fashioned for the heaviest knapsack. This was the ancient
English grenadier. But the modern grenadier, as he perambulates the
London pavement, is for the most part a fresh-colored lad of moderate
stature, who hardly strikes one as offering the elements of a very
solid national defence. He enlists, as a general thing, for six years,
and if he leave the army at the end of this term his service in the
ranks will have been hardly more than a juvenile escapade. I often
wonder, however, that the unemployed Englishman of humble origin