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."