"It is all very well to say that, Terence!" O'Grady exclaimed. "But wait until you try it a bit, my boy. I had five nights of it, and that widout a drop of whisky to cheer me. It was enough to have made Samson weep, let alone a man with only one hand, and a sword to hold in it, and a bad could in his head. It was enough to take the heart out of any man entoirely, and if it hadn't been for the credit of the regiment, I could often have sat down on a stone and blubbered. It is mighty hard for a man to keep up his spirits when he feels the mortal heat in him oozing out all over, and his fingers so cold that it is only by looking that one knows one has got a sword in them, and you don't know whether you are standing on your feet or on your knee-bones, and feel as if your legs don't belong to you, but are the property of some poor chap who has been kilt twenty-four hours before. Och, it was a terrible time! and a captain's pay is too small for it, if it was not for the divarsion of a scrimmage now and then!" "How about an ensign's pay?" Ryan laughed. "I think that on such work as we have had, O'Grady, the pay of all the officers, from the colonel down, ought to be put together and equally divided." "I cannot say whether I should approve the plan, Ryan, until I have made an intricate calculation, which, now I am comfortable at last, would be a sin and a shame to ask me brain to go through; but as my present idea is that I should be a loser, I may say that your scheme is a bad one, and not to say grossly disrespectful to the colonel, to put his value down as only equal to that of a slip of a lad like yourself. Boys nowadays have no respect for their supeyrior officers. There is Terence, who is not sixteen yet--" "Sixteen three months back, O'Grady," Terence put in. "Yes, I remember now, but a week or two one way or the other makes no difference. Here is Terence, just sixteen, who ought to be at school trying to get a little learning into his head, laying down the law to his supeyrior officers, just because he has had the luck to get onto the brigadier's staff. I think sometimes that the world is coming to an end." "At any rate, O'Grady," Terence laughed, "I am half a head taller than you are, and could walk you off your legs any day." "There! And he says this to a man who has gone through all the fatigues of the rear-guard, while he has been riding about the country like a gentleman at aise." "Well, I cannot stop any longer," Terence said. "I am on my way up to see how they are getting on with the earthworks, and the general may want me at any moment." "I would not trouble about that," O'Grady said, sarcastically; "perhaps he might make a shift to do widout you, widout detriment to the service."