“He thought we were savages or mad,” she used to say. “I think he might have borne anything, perhaps, but the bathtub. He said that we ‘put him in water!’” THE CAPTAIN’S YOUNGEST THE CAPTAIN’S YOUNGEST There never were another like him, that’s certain. I’ve seen a good many young gentlemen in my day, being in the army, and under officers as was what you may call swells, and had families of their own, some of them, but I never saw a young gentleman as could hold a candle to Master Lionel; no, nor as were fit to black his boots, for the matter of that. And I knew him, too, from the time he were a young gentleman in long clothes, being carried about in his ayah’s arms, and many’s the time I’ve carried him myself, and been proud to do it. I had no children of my own, though I’d always been taken with them. I wasn’t a married man, and knew I never should be, for that matter, after curly-headed little Maggie Shea died of the fever that blazing hot year when the disease was like a plague among us. She’d given me her promise only a week before; and I never saw the woman I wanted after her. Sometimes I’ve thought I was fonder of the children because of it. She had been fond of them, and like a little mother she was to the seven that were sisters and brothers to her. And there was a sort of reason Master Lionel was more to me than the rest. I’d known his father, Captain Dalgetty, in his best days, when he first came out to India with his regiment at the time of the Mutiny, and won such a name by his dare-devil bravery and determination. That was before he offended his crusty old father by marrying pretty Miss Rosie Terence, the drunken old Irish major’s daughter, who had nothing to her fortune but her dimples and her big blue eyes and black lashes, except the coaxing ways that drove the whole station wild with love for her. It _were_ said as Miss Rosie’s mother sent her out to her father to make a match, but if she did the old lady must have been terribly disappointed, because no sooner did the captain’s father hear of the marriage than he sent for his lawyer, and sat down then and there and made a will cutting the poor fellow off with a shilling, and leaving all his money to hospitals and churches. [Illustration: “I POLISHED AWAY AT THE CAPTAIN’S SABRE”]