Then, the strange, lost, homeless feeling that Home is nothing but a cot and a box in a big bare barrack-room, that the whole of God’s wide Universe contains no private and enclosed spot that is one’s own peculiar place wherein to be alone—­at first a truly terrible feeling.

How one envied the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major his Staff Quarters—­without going so far as to envy the great Riding-Master his real separate and detached house!

No privacy—­and a scarlet coat that encarnadined the world and made its wearer feel, as he so often thought, like a live coal glowing bright in Hell.

Surely the greatest of all an officer’s privileges was his right of mufti, his daily escape from the burning cloth.

“Why does not the British officer wear his uniform always?” writes the perennial gratuitous ass to the Press, periodically in the Silly Season....  Dam could tell him.

Memories ...!

Being jerked violently from uneasy slumber and broken, vivid dreams at 5 a.m., by the thunderous banging of the Troop Sergeant’s whip on the table, and his raucous roar of “Tumble out, you lazy swine, before you get sunstroke!  Rise and shine!  Rise and shine, you tripe-hounds!” ...  Broken dreams on a smelly, straw-stuffed pillow and lumpy straw-stuffed pallet, dreams of “Circle and cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-nge” “On the Fore-hand, Right About” “Right Pass, Shoulder Out” “Serpentine” “Order Lance” “Trail Lance” “Right Front Thrust" (for the front rank of the Queen’s Greys carry lances); dreams of riding wild mad horses to unfathomable precipices and at unsurmountable barriers....

Memories ...!

His first experience of “mucking out” stables at five-thirty on a chilly morning—­doing horrible work, horribly clad, feeling horribly sick.  Wheeling away intentionally and maliciously over-piled barrows to the muck-pits, upsetting them, and being cursed.

Being set to water a notoriously wild and vicious horse, and being pulled about like a little dog at the end of the chain, burning into frozen fingers.

Not much of the glamour and glow and glory left!

Better were the interesting and amusing experiences of the Riding-School where his trained and perfected hands and seat gave him a tremendous advantage, an early dismissal, and some amelioration of the roughness of one of the very roughest experiences in a very rough life.

Even he, though, knew what it was to have serge breeches sticking to abraided bleeding knees, to grip a stripped saddle with twin suppurating sores, and to burrow face-first in filthy tan via the back of a stripped-saddled buck-jumper.  How he had pitied some of the other recruits, making their first acquaintance with the Trooper’s “long-faced chum” under the auspices of a pitiless, bitter-tongued Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major! Rough! What a character the fellow was!  Never an oath, never a foul word, but what a vocabulary and gift of invective, sarcasm