Next morning, having been relieved from guard, I had returned home, and was taking my ease in my camp chair, luxuriously whiffing away at my after-breakfast cheroot, when who should step gingerly into the room but Manager Fred Gahagan.  The clouds of the previous evening had entirely disappeared from his ingenuous countenance, which was puckered up in the most insinuating manner, with what I was wont to call his ’borrowing smile;’ for Fred was oftentimes afflicted with impecuniosity—­a complaint common enough amongst us subs;—­and when the fit was on him, in the spirit of true friendship, he generally contrived to disburthen me of the few remaining rupees that constituted the balance of my last month’s pay.

Fred brought himself to an anchor upon a bullock trunk, and, after my boy had handed him a cheroot, and he had disgorged a few puffs of smoke, thus delivered himself—­

“This is a capital weed, Wilmot.  I don’t know how it is, but you always manage to have the best tobacco in the cantonment.”

“Hem,” said I, drily.  “Glad you like it.”

“I say, Peter, my dear fellow,” quoth he, “Fitzgerald, Grimes, and I, have just been talking over what we were discussing last night, about Lady Macbeth you know.”

“Yes,” said I, somewhat relieved to find the conversation was not taking the turn I dreaded.

“Well, sir,” continued Fred, plunging at once “in medias res,"and speaking very fast, “and we have come to the conclusion that you are the only person to relieve us from all difficulty on the subject; Fitzgerald will take your part of Banquo; and you shall have Lady Macbeth, a character for which every one agrees you are admirably fitted.”

“I play Lady Macbeth!” cried I, “with my scrubbing-brush of a beard, and whiskers like a prickly-pear hedge; why, you mast be all mad to think of such a thing.”

“My dear friend,” remarked Gahagan mildly, “you know I have always said that you had the Kemble eye and nose, and I’m sure you won’t hesitate about cutting off your whiskers when so much depends upon it; they’ll soon grow again you know, Peter; as for your dark chin that don’t matter a rush, as Lady Macbeth is a dark woman.”

The reader will agree with me in thinking that friendship can sometimes be as blind as love, when I say with respect to my “Kemble eye and nose,” that the former has been from childhood affected with a decided tendency to strabismus, and the latter bears a considerably stronger resemblance to a pump-handle than it does to the classic profile of John Kemble or any of his family.

“Lieutenant Gahagan,” said I, solemnly, “do you remember how, some six years ago at Hydrabad, when yet beardless and whiskerless, the only hair upon my face being eyebrows and eyelashes, at your instigation and ‘suadente diabolo,’ I attempted to perform Lydia Languish in ‘The Rivals?’ and hast thou yet forgotten, O son of an unsainted father, how my grenadier stride, the fixed tea-pot position of my arms, to say nothing of the numerous other solecisms in the code of female manners which I perpetrated on that occasion, made me a laughing-stock and a by-word for many a long day afterwards!  All this, I say, must be fresh in your recollection, and yet you have the audacity to ask me to expose myself again in a similar manner.”