But a voice awoke the recruity from his reverie--a voice of authority which asked with a most unnecessary emphasis what the blank, blank he meant by skulking there, when he knew conventionally well that he had been conventionally well ordered to the quartermaster’s stores to get his conventional kit. The recruit was not accustomed to hear himself addressed in this manner, and his earliest impulse was to hit the pug nose of the person who accosted him, but he remembered himself in time, and bethinking him of the wise man’s saying, that a soft answer turneth away wrath, he asked meekly where he should go. Then the Sergeant, who was so straitly trousered and jacketted that he pranced in his going, ordered him to follow his nose, adding that if he conventionally well supposed that because a conventional General in a conventional carriage came to see him off, he was entitled to shirk his conventional duties, he was conventionally well in error. ‘I say, Sergeant,’ said Polson, turning to face his conductor, ‘that’s a filthy bad habit. If you want to be respected, drop it.’ The Sergeant went as scarlet as his stable-jacket, and said that any conventional recruit had conventionally well _got_ to respect _him_ any conventional how. ‘My dear sir, no,’ said Polson. ‘It’s quite impossible to respect a man who talks like a foul-mouthed parrot.’ The Sergeant walked like a man astounded and said no more, and Polson likewise held his peace. They were both quietly businesslike whilst Polson got his kit served out to him, and by the time this work was over, the dinner hour had arrived. He was told off to a mess in a long barrack-room, in which his brother recruits were quartered, under the charge of an old soldier. Some of these new comrades were fresh from the plough, and some were the rowdy refuse of the town; one wore a miner’s flannels, and another was a weedy youth from a shop-counter, who had a higher opinion of himself than others were likely to form.