by Colonel Driscoll, who, for all his sixty years, has found no work too
arduous and no climate too unhealthy for his brave spirit. I knew him in
the Boer War when he commanded Driscoll's Scouts, of happy, though
irregular memory; their badge in those days, the harp of Erin on the
side of their slouch hats, and known throughout the country wherever
there was fighting to be had. The 25th Fusiliers, too, were out here in
the early days, and participated in the capture of Bukoba on the Lake. A
hundred professions are represented in their ranks. Miners from
Australia and the Congo, prospectors after the precious mineral earths
of Siam and the Malay States, pearl-fishers and elephant poachers,
actors and opera singers, jugglers, professional strong men, big-game
hunters, sailors, all mingled with professions of peace, medicine, the
law and the clerk's varied trade. Here two Englishmen, soldiers of
fortune or misfortune, as the case might be, who had specialised in
recent Mexican revolutions, till the fall of Huerta brought them, too,
to unemployment; an Irishman there, for whom the President of Costa Rica
had promised a swift death against a blank wall. Cunning in the art of
gun-running, they were knowing in all the tides of the Caribbean Sea,
and in every dodge to outwit the United States patrol. Nor must I forget
one priceless fellow, a lion-tamer, who, strange to say, feared
exceedingly the wild denizens of the scrub that sniffed around his
patrol at night.

Of our Indian forces the most likeable and attractive were the
Kashmiris, whom the patriot Rajah of Kashmir has given to the India
Government. Recruited from the mountains of Nepal--for the native of
Kashmir is no soldier--they meet one everywhere with their eager smiling
faces. In hospital they are always professing to a recovery from fever
that their pallid faces and enlarged spleens belie, and they take not
kindly to any suggestion of invaliding.