Arrived at the London terminus he sought a recruiting-sergeant and, of course, could not find one.

However, Canterbury and Cavalry were indissolubly connected in his mind, and it had occurred to him that, in the Guards, he would run more risk of coming face to face with people whom he knew than in any other corps.  He would go for the regiment he had known and loved in India (as he had been informed) and about which he had heard much all his life.  It was due for foreign service in a year or two, and, so far as he knew, none of its officers had ever heard of him.  Ormonde Delorme was mad about it, but could not afford its expensive mess.  Dam had himself thought how jolly it would be if Grumper “came down” sufficiently handsomely for him to be able to join it on leaving Sandhurst.  He’d join it now!

He hailed a hansom and proceeded to Charing Cross, whence he booked for the noble and ancient city of Canterbury.

Realizing that only one or two sovereigns would remain to him otherwise, he travelled in a third-class carriage for the first time in his hitherto luxurious life.  Its bare discomfort and unpleasant occupants (one was a very malodorous person indeed, and one a smoker of what smelt like old hats and chair-stuffing in a rank clay pipe) brought home to him more clearly than anything had done, the fact that he was a homeless, destitute person about to sell his carcase for a shilling, and seek the last refuge of the out-of-work, the wanted-by-the-police, the disgraced, and the runaway.

That carriage and its occupants showed him, in a blinding flash, that his whole position, condition, outlook, future, and life were utterly and completely changed.

He was Going Under.  Had anybody else ever done it so quickly?...

He went Under, and his entrance to the Underworld was through the great main-gates of the depot of the Queen’s Own (2nd) Regiment of Heavy Cavalry, familiarly known as the Queen’s Greys.

CHAPTER VIII.

TROOPERS OF THE QUEEN.

GLIMPSES OF CERTAIN “POOR DEVILS” AND THE HELL THEY INHABITED.

The Queen’s Own (2nd) Regiment of Heavy Cavalry (The Queen’s Greys) were under orders for India and the influence of great joy.  That some of its members were also under the influence of potent waters is perhaps a platitudinous corollary.

...  “And phwat the Divvle’s begone of me ould pal Patsy Flannigan, at all, at all?” inquired Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy, entering the barrack-room of E Troop of the Queen’s Greys, lying at Shorncliffe Camp.  “Divvle a shmell of the baste can I see, and me back from furlough-leaf for minnuts.  Has the schamer done the two-shtep widout anny flure, as Oi’ve always foretould?  Is ut atin’ his vegetables by the roots he now is in the bone-orchard, and me owing the poor bhoy foive shillin’?  Where is he?”

“In ’orsepittle,” laconically replied Trooper Henry Hawker, late of Whitechapel, without looking up from the jack-boot he was polishing.