As regards the equipment of Sir Evelyn’s force, there was nothing to find fault with,—the material for the necessary transport and stores was actually at Aldershot, and, for the Guards, in London. The troops embarked complete in every respect, except for the unavoidable absence of their Reserve men, which has now been supplied. On the whole, the Reserve men have come in very well, and the deficiency in the calculated numbers is very slight. The contrast in their age and physique to the boys of the battalions as we have known them, is very marked. On the other hand, it is reported that those who have left the colours for some years show sadly the defects of their not having been called out regularly for training. Many of them have certainly seen and handled the magazine-rifle. Others have not even done that. A certain falling off also in military habits and discipline is perhaps better indicated in a description which has been given by one of the correspondents of a trip he took in a railway carriage, with five men going to join their depôt from certain quarries in the north. We shall abridge his graphic sketch of the men in order to record the conversation he details. One of them, a big man with sandy whiskers and indifferently shaved, but evidently a good-natured fellow, clapped him familiarly on the knee after certain gifts of baccy and a little nip from his flask, which latter was, however, refused by two out of the five, had made them all disposed to be communicative. ‘Look ye here, sir, I doesn’t mind a bit going back for a little soldiering, but it seems strange like. Why, a few months ago, one of the officers of my old regiment came down to see us at the quarries where we was. He was a very nice young officer, had been adjutant, and if I’d seen him by myself on the road, I’d have liked nothing better than to touch my hat to him, and get a bit of a chat about old times. But, lor’ bless yer, if I’d saluted him down in the quarries I shouldn’t have heard the last of it this side of Christmas. He seemed rather worried like at the way we treated him, though we was all glad to see him, and he asked me about it. “Well,” says I, “the reason the chaps don’t salute you, is just that they darn’t for fear of the chaff.” “What do yer salute him for? yer needn’t, yer know,” that’s what all the other men in the quarries would want to know. Well, yer know, sir, ’tain’t that. It’s a kind of way of saying as you belong to the same body like as he does. He’s got his dooty and you’ve got yours. But, lor’ bless you, you never could make the quarry chaps see that. “See what John Morley says,” they’d say, “he tells yer it’s rank slavery, and that’s just what it is. You make believe to like it, cos you’ve lost yer tail and ’ud like to see other chaps lose theirs.” Well, yer know, sir, when you’ve been five or six years among that sort o’ thing, and all the time you haven’t had the chance of so much as seeing