The three officers looked at him approvingly, and the ensign muttered, “By gad, he’s a trump, and no mistake!” but “Old Swipes” shook his grey head with a half-melancholy smile as he scanned the boy’s handsome face and shapely figure, set off by his blue lancer uniform, muddy and travel-stained as it was. “I’ve seen many a fine fellow go down,” thought the veteran, “and I like it less and less--this lad’s too good for the Kaffirs; d----n me, I shall never get used to it;” however, he did not quite know how to refuse so soldier-like a request, so he only coughed, and said, “Well--I don’t approve of _volunteering_--we old soldiers go where we’re ordered, but we _never volunteer_. Still, I suppose you won’t stay here, with fighting in the front. ’Gad, you _shall_ go--you’re a _real_ good one, and I _like_ you for it.” So the fine old fellow seized Charlie’s hand and wrung it hard, with the tears in his eyes. And now our three friends prepared to make themselves comfortable. The old captain’s tent was the largest, but it was not water-tight, and consequently stood in a swamp. His supper, therefore, was added to the joint stock, and the four gentlemen who, at the best club in London, would have turned up their noses at turtle because it was _thick_, or champagne because it was sweet, sat down quite contentedly to half-raw lumps of stringy beef and a tin mug only half filled with the muddiest of water, glad to get even that. How they laughed and chatted and joked about their fare! To have heard them talk one would have supposed that they were at dinner within a day’s march of Pall Mall, London--the opera, the turf, the ring, each and all had their turn; and when the sergeant on duty came to report the “lights out,” said lights consisting of two lanterns for the whole detachment, Charlie had just proposed “fox-hunting” as a toast with which to finish the last sip of brandy, and treated his entertainers to a “view-holloa” _in a whisper_, that he might not alarm the camp, which, save for the lowing of certain oxen in the rear, was ere long hushed in the most profound repose.