Also the drawled remark of the Adjutant afterwards, “Ah—what—ah—University?”—his own prompt reply of “Whitechapel, sir,” and the Adjutant’s approving “Exactly…. You’ll get on here by good conduct, good riding, and good drill—not by—ah—good accent or anything else.” How well he remembered the strange depolarized feeling consequent upon realizing that his whole worldly possessions consisted in three “grey-back” shirts, two pairs of cotton pants, two pairs of woollen socks, a towel; a hold-all containing razor, shaving-brush, spoon, knife and fork, and a button-stick; a cylindrical valise with hair-brush, clothes-brush, brass-brush, and boot-brushes; a whip, burnisher, and dandy-brush (all three, for some reason, to be paid for as part of a “free” kit); jack-boots and jack-spurs, wellington-boots and swan-neck box-spurs, ammunition boots; a tin of blacking and another of plate powder; blue, white-striped riding-breeches, blue, white-striped overalls, drill-suit of blue serge, scarlet tunic, scarlet stable-jacket, scarlet drill “frock,” a pair of trousers of lamentable cut “authorized for grooming,” brass helmet with black horse-hair plume, blue pill-box cap with white stripe and button, gauntlets and gloves, sword-belt and pouch-belt, a carbine and a sword. Also of a daily income of one loaf, butter, tea, and a pound of meat (often uneatable), and the sum of one shilling and twopence subject to a deduction of threepence a day “mess-fund,” fourpence a month for delft, and divers others for library, washing, hair-cutting, barrack-damages, etc. Yes, it had given one a strange feeling of nakedness, and yet of a freedom from the tyranny of things, to find oneself so meagrely and yet so sufficiently endowed. Then, the strange, lost, homeless feeling that Home is nothing but a cot and a box in a big bare barrack-room, that the whole of God’s wide Universe contains no private and enclosed spot that is one’s own peculiar place wherein to be alone—at first a truly terrible feeling. How one envied the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major his Staff Quarters—without going so far as to envy the great Riding-Master his real separate and detached house! No privacy—and a scarlet coat that encarnadined the world and made its wearer feel, as he so often thought, like a live coal glowing bright in Hell. Surely the greatest of all an officer’s privileges was his right of mufti, his daily escape from the burning cloth. “Why does not the British officer wear his uniform always?” writes the perennial gratuitous ass to the Press, periodically in the Silly Season…. Dam could tell him. Memories …!