drafts for India, and the battle raged from the Dockyard Gates
even to the slums of Longport, while the drabs of Fratton came
down and scratched the faces of the Queen's Officers.

Bobby Wick, with an ugly bruise on his freckled nose, a sick and
shaky detachment to manoeuvre inship, and the comfort of fifty
scornful females to attend to, had no time to feel homesick till
the Malabar reached mid-Channel, when he doubled his emotions with
a little guard-visiting and a great many other matters.

The Tail Twisters were a most particular Regiment. Those who knew
them least said that they were eaten up with "side." But their
reserve and their internal arrangements generally were merely
protective diplomacy. Some five years before, the Colonel
commanding had looked into the fourteen fearless eyes of seven
plump and juicy subalterns who had all applied to enter the Staff
Corps, and had asked them why the three stars should he, a colonel
of the Line, command a dashed nursery for double-dashed bottle-
suckers who put on condemned tin spurs and rode qualified mokes at
the hiatused heads of forsaken Black Regiments. He was a rude man
and a terrible. Wherefore the remnant took measures (with the
half-butt as an engine of public opinion) till the rumour went
abroad that young men who used the Tail Twisters as a crutch to
the Staff Corps had many and varied trials to endure. However, a
regiment has just as much right to its own secrets as a woman.

When Bobby came up from Deolali and took his place among the Tail
Twisters, it was gently but firmly borne in upon him that the
Regiment was his father and his mother and his indissolubly wedded
wife, and that there was no crime under the canopy of heaven