‘Now, young chap, you must brush up, brush up, and show yourself a man. We’ve to be comrades, you and I, and it won’t suit me to consort with a chap as is given to peek and pine. What do you call yourself?’ This was delicately put. Recruits do not always enlist under their own names; so Hanlon asked, not what Herbert was called, but what he called himself. ‘Herbert Larkins.’ ‘Good; and not a bad looking chap either. Too tall--leastwise I’m afraid you’re going to grow--’ Hanlon, like many little men, hated those whose inches far exceeded his own. In the days when there had been grenadiers, it was his favourite pastime, when at all the worse for liquor, to beard the giants in their own barrack-room. He called them ‘hop-poles,’ ‘sand-bags,’ ‘wooden ramrods,’ and other opprobrious names, and his onslaughts generally ended in his being carried, bodily, to the guard-room, under some stalwart soldier’s arm. Now that the grenadier company was abolished, he disseminated his dislike, and abused every private who was more that five feet six in height. ‘Too tall, unless you stop as you are. Gin perhaps’d do it; or whiskey; or perhaps “four” ale--if you took enough of it. Fond of “four” ale, eh?’ Hanlon’s eyes glistened with a toper’s joy as he mentioned his favourite fluid. ‘Ah! there’s nothing like “four” ale. I’m under stoppages myself,’ he went on, meditatively, ‘or I’d stand treat. But you’ll have got your bounty, and the money for your “coloured” clothes. You ain’t got the price of a glass about you?’ Herbert admitted readily enough that he had the price of several. He had lost none of his schoolboy freehandedness, and he had moreover the wit to see that his new comrade might, if propitiated, prove an uncommonly useful friend. Hanlon first made Herbert swallow some piping hot tea which was brought in just then, and gave him the whole of his ‘tea’ bread; Hanlon’s own appetite was indifferent; and then the two, amid the winks and jeers of the rest, strolled over to the canteen. The place was not over full. Nothing stronger than ale and porter could be sold in it, and the Duke’s Own generally preferred the Triggertown taverns. So would Hanlon, but he knew that a newly enlisted recruit would not be permitted to leave barracks.