The idea, as I say, was quite new to our friend. Even though that very morning his colleague in the weigh-bill pastime had chucked it and joined, even though he'd heard a foreman discussing who they were to put in his place as "that young Meyrick was habsolutely 'opeless," it still hadn't dawned on him that he might go too. But the recruiting sergeant was a man of some knowledge; in his daily round he encountered many and varied types. In two minutes he had fired the boy's imagination with a glowing and partially true description of the glories of war and the army, and supplied him with another set of dreams to fill his brain. Wasting no time, he struck while the iron was hot, and in a few minutes John Meyrick, sometime checker of weigh-bills, died, and No. 8469, Private John Meyrick, came into being.... But though you change a man's vocation with the stroke of a pen, you do not change his character. A dreamer he was in the beginning, and a dreamer he remained to the end. And dreaming, as I have already pointed out, was not a thing which commended itself to Company-Sergeant-Major Hayton, who in due course became one of the chief arbiters of our friend's destinies. True it was no longer coral islands--but such details availed not with cook's mates and other busy movers in the regimental hive. Where he'd got them from, Heaven knows, those tattered volumes of Kipling; but their matchless spirit had caught his brain and fired his soul, with the result--well, the first of them has been given. There were more results to follow. Not three days after he was again upon the mat for the same offence, only to say much the same as before. "I do try, sir--I do try; but some'ow----" And though in the bottom of his heart the officer believed him, though in a very strange way he felt interested in him, there are limits and there are rules. There comes a time, as he had said, when one can't judge by motives, when one can only judge by results. "You mustn't only try; you must succeed. Three days to barracks." * * * * * That night in mess the officer sat next to the Colonel. "It's the thrusters, the martinets, the men of action who win the V.C.'s and D.C.M.'s, my dear fellow," said his C.O., as he pushed along the wine. "But it's the dreamers, the idealists who deserve them. They suffer so much more." And as Major Seymour poured himself out a glass of port, a face came into his mind--the face of a stumpy, uncouth man with deep-set eyes. "I wonder," he murmured--"I wonder." * * * * *