Being jerked violently from uneasy slumber and broken, vivid dreams at 5 a.m., by the thunderous banging of the Troop Sergeant’s whip on the table, and his raucous roar of “Tumble out, you lazy swine, before you get sunstroke! Rise and shine! Rise and shine, you tripe-hounds!” … Broken dreams on a smelly, straw-stuffed pillow and lumpy straw-stuffed pallet, dreams of “_Circle and cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-nge” “On the Fore-hand, Right About” “Right Pass, Shoulder Out” “Serpentine” “Order Lance” “Trail Lance” “Right Front Thrust”_ (for the front rank of the Queen’s Greys carry lances); dreams of riding wild mad horses to unfathomable precipices and at unsurmountable barriers…. Memories …! His first experience of “mucking out” stables at five-thirty on a chilly morning—doing horrible work, horribly clad, feeling horribly sick. Wheeling away intentionally and maliciously over-piled barrows to the muck-pits, upsetting them, and being cursed. Being set to water a notoriously wild and vicious horse, and being pulled about like a little dog at the end of the chain, burning into frozen fingers. Not much of the glamour and glow and glory left! Better were the interesting and amusing experiences of the Riding-School where his trained and perfected hands and seat gave him a tremendous advantage, an early dismissal, and some amelioration of the roughness of one of the very roughest experiences in a very rough life. Even he, though, knew what it was to have serge breeches sticking to abraided bleeding knees, to grip a stripped saddle with twin suppurating sores, and to burrow face-first in filthy tan _via_ the back of a stripped-saddled buck-jumper. How he had pitied some of the other recruits, making their first acquaintance with the Trooper’s “long-faced chum” under the auspices of a pitiless, bitter-tongued Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major! _Rough!_ What a character the fellow was! Never an oath, never a foul word, but what a vocabulary and gift of invective, sarcasm and cruel stinging reproof! A well-educated man if not a gentleman. “Don’t dismount again, Muggins—or is it Juggins?—without permission” when some poor fellow comes on his head as his horse (bare of saddle and bridle) refuses at a jump. “Get up (and SIT BACK) you—you—hen, you pierrot, you _Aard Vark,_ you after-thought, you refined entertainer, you pimple, you performing water-rat, you mistake, you _byle_, you drip, you worm-powder…. What? You think your leg’s broken? Well—_you’ve got another_, haven’t you? Get up and break that. Keep your neck till you get a stripped saddle and no reins…. Don’t embrace the horse like that, you pawn-shop, I can hear it blushing…. Send for the key and get inside it…. Keep those fine feet forward. Keep them _forward_ (and SIT BACK), Juggins or Muggins, or else take them into the Infantry—what they were meant for by the look of them. Now then—over you go without falling if I have to keep you here all night…. Look at _that_” (as the poor fellow is thrown across