I need not say that neither of these was the name by which he appeared in the Army List. The Muleteer was not his original by-name, although there may be a good many people who never knew him by another. When I remember him first--that was about thirty years ago--he was familiarly known in the cavalry regiment he had then recently joined, as Jellypod. I knew more of him as Jellypod than I did of him after he came to be known by the other name; but have you never noticed how completely a later by-name supersedes an earlier? I think of him habitually as the Muleteer, and had even to tax my memory to recollect the earlier Jellypod appellation. He came to the Potterers from a militia regiment. Nowadays the militia is a chartered and approved vestibule to the regular army: and it is quite the thing for a youngster to go straight from the Outlandshire Rurals into the Grenadier Guards or the Blues. But it was a different matter thirty years ago, when the aspiring militiaman had to purchase, and when it was regarded as a mild form of impertinence on his part if he did not creep humbly into some unpretentious high-low regiment. But this man had actually bought into cavalry, and what made his _outrecuidance_ the more marked was that he had come from a London militia regiment. No doubt times are changed, and the salt of the earth do their mimic soldiery in the corps which now swaggers as the 10th battalion of the Royal Fusiliers or the 21st battalion of the Rifle Brigade. But thirty years ago the metropolitan and suburban militias were not held in lofty esteem. In a county militia regiment you might lay your account with finding a considerable sprinkling of younger sons of the territorial families, and probably the major would be a man who had served in the regulars, and had gone in for the local corps when he married and retired to settle down on his patrimonial estate. But the London regiments had not this stamp of officerhood. As like as not the Colonel Commandant would be a soap-boiler engaged in the active duties of his odoriferous profession. You would find no doubt ex-regulars holding commissions, but they were rather of the copper captain variety, who bound their militia commissions as phylacteries on their foreheads in evidence that their claim to the title of officer and gentleman was unimpaired by the little cloud under which they had retired from more active service. A militia commission has always been more or less of a useful item of stock-in-trade to a man living by his wits; and gentlemen of this type were sandwiched freely in the old days in the London regiments between the dashing scions of aldermen and the _jeunesse dorée_ of the Stock Exchange.