and, after the wedding, Slane was going up to the Hills with the
bride. None the less, Slane's grievance was that the affair would
be only a hired-carriage wedding, and he felt that the "eeklar" of
that was meagre. Miss M'Kenna did not care so much. The Sergeant's
wife was helping her to make her wedding-dress, and she was very
busy. Slane was, just then, the only moderately contented man in
barracks. All the rest were more or less miserable.

And they had so much to make them happy, too. All their work was
over at eight in the morning, and for the rest of the day they
could lie on their backs and smoke Canteen-plug and swear at the
punkah-coolies. They enjoyed a fine, full flesh meal in the middle
of the day, and then threw themselves down on their cots and
sweated and slept till it was cool enough to go out with their
"towny," whose vocabulary contained less than six hundred words,
and the Adjective, and whose views on every conceivable question
they had heard many times before.

There was the Canteen, of course, and there was the Temperance
Room with the second-hand papers in it; but a man of any
profession cannot read for eight hours a day in a temperature of
96ø or 98ø in the shade, running up sometimes to 103ø at midnight.
Very few men, even though they get a pannikin of flat, stale,
muddy beer and hide it under their cots, can continue drinking for
six hours a day. One man tried, but he died, and nearly the whole
regiment went to his funeral because it gave them something to do.
It was too early for the excitement of fever or cholera. The men
could only wait and wait and wait, and watch the shadow of the
barrack creeping across the blinding white dust. That was a gay
life.