“D’yer know where you are, you ...” roared Hawker.

“Dear Heart, I am in hell,” replied the recumbent one, “but by the Mercy of God I’m splendidly drunk.  Yes, hell. ’Lasciate ogni speranza,’ sweet Amaryllis.  I am Morag of the Misty Way. Mos’ misty.  Milky Way.  Yesh.  Milk Punchy Way.” ...

“I’ll give you all the punch you’ll want, in abaht two ticks if you don’t chuck it—­you blarsted edjucated flea,” warned Hawker, half rising.

Dam got up and pulled on his cloak preparatory to helping the o’er-taken one to bed, as a well-aimed ammunition boot took the latter nearly on the ear.

Struggling to his feet with the announcement that he was “the King’s fair daughter, weighed in the balance and found—­devilish heavy and very drunk,” the unhappy youth lurched and fell upon the outraged Hawker—­who struck him a cruel blow in the face.

At the sound of the blow and heavy fall, Dam turned, saw the blood—­and went Stukeley-mad.  Springing like a tiger upon Hawker he dragged him from his cot and knocked him across it.  In less than a minute he had twice sent him to the boards, and it took half-a-dozen men on either side to separate the combatants and get them to postpone the finish till the morning.  That night Dam dreamed his dream and, on the morrow, behind the Riding-School, and in fifteen rounds, became, by common consent, champion bruiser of the Queen’s Greys—­by no ambition of his own.

And so—­as has been said—­Trooper Henry Hawker ungrudgingly referred Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy to him in the matter of reducing the pride of the Young Jock who had dared to “desthroy” a dragoon.

Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy—­in perfect-fitting glove-tight scarlet stable-jacket (that never went near a stable, being in fact the smart shell-jacket, shaped like an Eton coat, sacred to “walking-out” purposes), dark blue overalls with broad white stripe, strapped over half-wellington boots adorned with glittering swan-neck spurs, a pill-box cap with white band and button, perched jauntily on three hairs—­also looked what he was, the ideal heavy-cavalry man, the swaggering, swashbuckling trooper, beau sabreur, good all round and all through....

The room in which these worthies and various others (varying also in dress, from shirt and shorts to full review-order for Guard) had their being, expressed the top note and last cry—­or the lowest note and deepest groan—­of bleak, stark utilitarianism.  Nowhere was there hint or sign of grace and ornament.  Bare deal-plank floor, bare white-washed walls, plank and iron truckle beds, rough plank and iron trestle tables, rough plank and iron benches, rough plank and iron boxes clamped to bedsteads, all bore the same uniform impression of useful ugliness, ugly utility.  The apologist in search of a solitary encomium might have called it clean—­save around the hideous closed stove where muddy boots, coal-dust, pipe-dottels, and the bitter-end of five-a-penny “gaspers"[18] rebuked his rashness.