Now a soldier on picquet, or at night, usually presents arms to nobody; but a sentinel on camp-guard by day is expected to perform that ceremony to anything in human shape that has two rows of buttons.  Here was a human shape, but so utterly buttonless that it exhibited not even a rag to which a button could by any earthly possibility be appended, buttonless even potentially; and my blameless Ethiopian presented arms to even this.  Where, then, are the theories of Carlyle, the axioms of “Sartor Resartus,” the inability of humanity to conceive “a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?” Cautioning my adherent, however, as to the proprieties suitable for such occasions thenceforward, I left him watching the river with renewed vigilance, and awaiting the next merman who should report himself.

Finding my way to the building, I hunted up a sergeant and a blanket, got a fire kindled in the dismantled chimney, and sat before it in my single garment, like a moist, but undismayed Choctaw, until my horse and clothing could be brought round from the Causeway.  It seemed strange that the morning had not yet dawned, after the uncounted periods that must have elapsed; but when my wardrobe arrived, I looked at my watch and found that my night in the water had lasted precisely one hour.

Galloping home, I turned in with alacrity, and without a drop of whiskey, and waked a few hours after in excellent condition.  The rapid changes of which that Department has seen so many—­and, perhaps, to so little purpose—­soon transferred us to a different scene.  I have been on other scouts since then, and by various processes, but never with a zest so novel as was afforded by that night’s experience.  The thing soon got wind in the regiment, and led to only one ill consequence, so far as I know.  It rather suppressed a way I had of lecturing the officers on the importance of reducing their personal baggage to a minimum.  They got a trick of congratulating me, very respectfully, on the thoroughness with which I had once conformed my practice to my precepts.

* * * * *

On A late vendue.

The red flag—­not the red flag of the loathed and deadly pestilence that has destroyed so many lives and disfigured so many fair and so many manly countenances, but (in some circumstances) the scarcely less ominous flag of the auctioneer—­has been displayed from the handsome and substantial red-brick house in Kensington-Place Gardens, London, in which Thackeray lately lived, and in which he wrote the opening chapters of his last and never-to-be-completed work, which we are all reading with mingled pleasure and regret.