Jellypod was a good sort of fellow in his way, but he did not hit it off with the Potterers. For one thing he was a married man with two children. Now in the matter of matrimony among the officers, the Potterers might have belonged to the army of the late lamented Cetewayo. Old Growler the colonel--he had been chief ever since the Crimea, and it was currently believed that he had sworn to live to a hundred and to die in the command of the Potterers, resolutely refusing promotion--old Colonel Growler had laid down the rule that no officer should marry and remain in the regiment who was not at least half-way up among the captains. A junior captain might wed, although frowned upon, on giving his pledge to send in his papers within the year; but lo! here was a cornet joining, not only with a wife, but with a wife who was a foreigner, and there was the additional aggravation of brats. Then Jellypod, subsequently the Muleteer, had a modest confidence in himself. Among his burglars and pickpockets he had learnt foot drill thoroughly, and the first time he turned out to recruits’ drill in the barrack square, had affably set the “regimental” right in regard to a word of command. He had studied Jomini, had detected the superficiality of Hamley’s _Operations of War_, and had visited scientifically the battlefields of 1859 in Northern Italy. He had not been in the Potterers a week before he had tendered every officer a printed copy of an (undelivered) lecture before the United Service Institution on the utility of cavalry as a support to infantry. Before a fortnight was over he had confided to the adjutant, who--of course I mean the fine old ranker adjutant--was always very friendly and confidential with newly joined officers, that he regarded the regimental system of the Potterers as reprehensibly slack; and that he thought every one under the rank of field-officer should invariably attend morning and evening stables. One fine day after luncheon he followed the chief into the anteroom and asked him whether he would have any objections to a project he (Jellypod) had conceived, that he should give a course of evening lectures in the garrison library to the non-commissioned officers of the regiment on the German cavalry method of working by “fours.” Old Growler stared at him grimly from under his shaggy eyebrows for the space of about a minute, deliberately expectorated into the grate, then rose, and, without a word, stalked out of the room. Jellypod did not win much favour from the fat old quarter-master when he suggested to that worthy that the regimental meat should be cast every morning, until the contractor realised that the second class beef he was in the practice of sending in would no longer be accepted.