They made a curious contrast--these two types. The lathy, town-bred Thomas with hock-bottle shoulders, a little education, and a keen desire to get more medals and stripes; and the little, deep-chested, bull-necked Corporal brimming over with vitality and devoid of any ideas beyond the “regiment.” And the end of both lives, in all likelihood, would be a nameless grave in some cantonment burying-ground, with, if the case were specially interesting and the Regimental Doctor had a turn for the pen, an obituary notice in the _Indian Medical Journal_. It was an unpleasant thought. From the Army to the Navy is a perfectly natural transition, but one hardly to be expected in the heart of India. Dawn showed the railway carriage full of riotous boys, for the Agra and Mount Abu schools had broken up for holidays. Surely it was natural enough to ask a child--not a boy, but a child--whether he was going home for the holidays; and surely it was a crushing, a petrifying thing, to hear in a clear treble, tinged with icy _hauteur_:--“No! I’m on leave. I’m a midshipman.” Two “officers of Her Majesty’s Navy"--mids of a man-o’-war in Bombay ---- were going Up-country on ten days’ leave! They had not travelled much more than twice round the world; but they should have printed the fact on a label. They chattered like daws, and their talk was as a whiff of fresh air from the open sea, while the train ran eastward under the Aravalis. At that hour their lives were bound up in and made glorious by the hope of riding a horse when they reached their journey’s end. Much had they seen “cities and men,” and the artless way in which they interlarded their conversation with allusions to “one of these shore-going chaps you see” was delicious. They had no cares, no fears, no servants, and an unlimited stock of wonder and admiration for everything they saw, from the “cute little well-scoops” to a herd of deer grazing on the horizon. It was not until they had opened their young hearts with infantine abandon that the listener could guess from the incidental _argot_ where these pocket-Ulysseses had travelled. South African, Norwegian, and Arabian words were used to help out the slang of Haslar, and a copious vocabulary of shipboard terms, complicated with modern Greek. As free from self-consciousness as children, as ignorant as beings from another planet of the Anglo-Indian life into which they were going to dip for a few days, shrewd and observant as befits men of the world who have authority, and neat-handed and resourceful as--blue-jackets, they were a delightful study, and accepted freely and frankly the elaborate apologies tendered to them for the unfortunate mistake about the “holidays.” The roads divided and they went their way; and there was a shadow after they had gone, for the Globe-Trotter said to his wife:--“What I like about Jeypore"--accent on the first syllable, if you please--“is its characteristic easternness.” And the