Boulter's Rents, in my first novel, 'A Life's Atonement,' were drawn from Gee's Court. I thought the picture rather like at the time, within limits; but I never had the heart--or the stomach--to be a realist. Feebly as I dared to paint it, I had to re-form it in fancy before the book was finished. The original horror stands there, pretty much unreformed; though I dare say its walls get a coat or two more whitewash than they did when I was intimate with them. I have kept for this place in a rambling record a story which might have been told in my last paper. When I left the barracks of Ballincollig and said good-bye to her Majesty's service, I had an encounter with one of my non-commissioned enemies. I had my leave of absence in my pocket, and my discharge was to follow me by post I was in civilian dress and was smoking a cigar at the barrack gates. My enemy saluted before he had had time to recognise me, and then, seeing to whom he had done this homage, stood abashed at himself for a minute and then exploded. He could think of nothing better to say than to order me to put out my cigar. I refused to obey, for I was yards beyond the magazine limit, within which it was, of course, forbidden to smoke, and I gave that sergeant a piece of my mind. One is a good deal more vehement at nineteen than one grows to be when creeping on towards the fifties, and I made my sergeant a dreadful promise. I told him that he had acted like an unmitigated brute to me, and I undertook, if ever I should meet him in civil life, to inflict upon him a chastisement which should repay us both amply. I never met him again for thirteen years, and I was slumming when I ran against him. He was acting as commissionaire at a big manufacturing place in the East End, and when I accosted him he had no idea of my identity. I wore a beard and had taken to wearing spectacles, and, if ever I had looked warlike, had lost that aspect long ago. I asked him if he were Sergeant ----. He admitted that at once. He had served in the Fourth Royal Irish? 'Seventeen years, sir; but I don't remember you.' He had been quartered at Cahir, I reminded him, in the year '65, and in '66 at Ballincollig. He admitted that quite willingly and seemed interested. Did he remember a recruit who was nicknamed 'Oxford?' He thought he remembered that recruit, and paled visibly. He was not the stalwart fellow he had been, but looked bowed down as if by a premature old age. I asked him why he had left his regiment. 'Hernia, sir; hernia and pulmonary consumption,'