It was a cheerful babel of matters personal, provincial, and imperial, pieces of old call-over lists, and new policies, cut short by the roar of a Burmese gong, and we went down not less than a quarter of a mile of stairs to meet Infant’s mother, who had known us all in our school-days and greeted us as if those had ended a week ago. But it was fifteen years since, with tears of laughter, she had lent me a gray princess-skirt for amateur theatricals. That was a dinner from the “Arabian Nights,” served in an eighty-foot hall full of ancestors and pots of flowering roses, and, what was more impressive, heated by steam. When it was ended and the little mother had gone away--(“You boys want to talk, so I shall say good-night now”)--we gathered about an apple-wood fire, in a gigantic polished steel grate, under a mantel-piece ten feet high, and the Infant compassed us about with curious liqueurs and that kind of cigarette which serves best to introduce your own pipe. “Oh, bliss!” grunted Dick Four from a sofa, where he had been packed with a rug over him. “First time I’ve been warm since I came home.” We were all nearly on top of the fire, except Infant, who had been long enough at home to take exercise when he felt chilled. This is a grisly diversion, but much affected by the English of the Island. “If you say a word about cold tubs and brisk walks,” drawled McTurk, “I’ll kill you, Infant. I’ve got a liver, too. ’Member when we used to think it a treat to turn out of our beds on a Sunday morning--thermometer fifty-seven degrees if it was summer--and bathe off the Pebbleridge? Ugh!” “’Thing I don’t understand,” said Tertius, “was the way we chaps used to go down into the lavatories, boil ourselves pink, and then come up with all our pores open into a young snow-storm or a black frost. Yet none of our chaps died, that I can remember.” “Talkin’ of baths,” said McTurk, with a chuckle, “’member our bath in Number Five, Beetle, the night Rabbits-Eggs rocked King? What wouldn’t I give to see old Stalky now! He is the only one of the two Studies not here.” “Stalky is the great man of his Century,” said Dick Four. “How d’you know?” I asked. “How do I know?” said Dick Four, scornfully. “If you’ve ever been in a tight place with Stalky you wouldn’t ask.” “I haven’t seen him since the camp at Pindi in ’87,” I said. “He was goin’ strong then--about seven feet high and four feet through.” “Adequate chap. Infernally adequate,” said Tertius, pulling his mustache and staring into the fire. “Got dam’ near court-martialed and broke in Egypt in ’84,” the Infant volunteered. “I went out in the same trooper with him--as raw as he was. Only _I_ showed it, and Stalky didn’t.” “What was the trouble?” said McTurk, reaching forward absently to twitch my dress-tie into position.