his face gnarled like the scarped brow of Ingleborough, broke in on a pretty little outline he was venturing to sketch of the good times Socialism offered to the soldier. “Mon,” quoth honest Escrick, “thou mun be a dom fuil, if nobbut warse. Wi’ your bloody community o’ goods, as thou call’st it, what would happen my feyther, t’oud statesman? Gang to hell oot of this!” Whereupon Escrick threw the quart-pot (empty) at L’Estrange’s head, who abandoned thenceforth the society of the Household Cavalry. But he had greater success with the infantrymen of the Household troops--a force whose character, as in a measure its physique, has deteriorated since the adoption of the three years’ service system. In the slums of Westminster he gradually corrupted men by beer and blandishments, with such success that in no long time the rank-and-file of one whole battalion were tainted with disaffection, and in a fair way to become dangerous. With all this good fortune, and realising with a lurid gratification that at least one battalion of Her Majesty’s Household troops was now little other than a plastic instrument in his hands, the astute conspirator was well aware that it still behoved him to work warily and to consolidate the plot by further specific guarantees for success. He remembered the sardonic adage whose author was an acute fellow-countryman of his own--that of three Irish conspirators it might be taken for granted that one was an informer. There were not many Irish soldiers in the ranks of the Household Brigade, but there were many men whose fealty to his propaganda, spite of their professions, he instinctively felt was not to be relied on. So long as these propaganda were of a loose and general character, there was not anything very specific for the informer to reveal. But it would be a very different thing were all or any large proportion of his converts to be initiated formally into the membership of the disloyal and anarchical confederacy which he represented. Yet he could not trust the situation as it stood. All experience taught him how backward to assert itself actively was the most disaffected community which lacked the inspiration and initiative of ready and energetic leaders. Out of the mass of grumbling discontented soldiery L’Estrange set himself to select a number of men of strongest character, of fiercest nature, of greatest recklessness of consequences. This winnowing method he carried out both in the Scarlet Hussars and in the Household Infantry, and having recruited to his behests a band of desperadoes in either corps, he had those “select men” sworn by detachments into memberhood of the Regenerators at the obscure branch lodge whose quarters were in the Natty Coster beerhouse up Skin-the-Rabbit Court off the New Cut.