“Thumped, my dear sir, is scarcely the word I should use under the circumstances. That hackneyed verb of every dolt who has neither ear nor imagination should not be chosen by a fellow-artist, a man of letters, to describe the roll of the drum. My happiest days, as I was about to say, were when I carried Kildalton’s silver drum, for which this one is but an indifferent substitute.” “Well, at least,” said I lamely, “the drummer of the 71st has gone pretty far in another art than music.” “It is very good of you to say so,” remarked Urquhart, with quiet dignity and an old-fashioned bow. “I trust, by-and-by, with assiduity to become as good a sculptor as I was a drummer.” “How did you happen to join the Army?” I asked, anxious to have him follow up so promising an introduction. “Because I was a fool. Mind, I do not regret it, for I had at the same time, in my folly, such memorable and happy experiences as quite improperly (as you might think) never come to the doorstep of the very wise. Still, I joined the Army in a fool’s escapade, resenting what seemed to me the insufferable restrictions of a Scottish manse. My father was incumbent of a parish, half Highland, half Lowland. At sixteen I came home from Edinburgh and my first session of the University there; at sixteen and a half I mutinied against sixpence a week of pocket-money and the prospect of the Divinity Hall for one (as I felt) designed by Heaven for Art, and with a borrowed name and an excellently devised tale of orphanhood, took a bounty in the territorial regiment. They put me to the drums. They professed to find me so well suited there that they kept me at them all the time I was a King’s man, in spite of all my protests, and there, if you are in the mood for a story, I had an experience. “The corps had two drums of silver, one of which was entrusted to me. They were called ‘Kildalton’s drums,’ in compliment to their donor, from whose lands no fewer than four companies of the 71st had been embodied. They were handsome instruments, used only for stately occasions, and mine, at least, so much engaged my fancy that I liked to keep it shining like a mirror; and the cords and tassels of silk—pleated, as we were told, by Kildalton’s daughter—appealed so much to the dandiacal in me, I fretted to have them wet on a parade. You can fancy, therefore, my distress when my darling was subjected to the rough work and hazards of the sack of Ciudad Rodrigo.