I need not say that neither of these was the name by which he appeared in the Army List. The Muleteer was not his original by-name, although there may be a good many people who never knew him by another. When I remember him first—that was about thirty years ago—he was familiarly known in the cavalry regiment he had then recently joined, as Jellypod. I knew more of him as Jellypod than I did of him after he came to be known by the other name; but have you never noticed how completely a later by-name supersedes an earlier? I think of him habitually as the Muleteer, and had even to tax my memory to recollect the earlier Jellypod appellation.

He came to the Potterers from a militia regiment. Nowadays the militia is a chartered and approved vestibule to the regular army: and it is quite the thing for a youngster to go straight from the Outlandshire Rurals into the Grenadier Guards or the Blues. But it was a different matter thirty years ago, when the aspiring militiaman had to purchase, and when it was regarded as a mild form of impertinence on his part if he did not creep humbly into some unpretentious high-low regiment. But this man had actually bought into cavalry, and what made his outrecuidance the more marked was that he had come from a London militia regiment. No doubt times are changed, and the salt of the earth do their mimic soldiery in the corps which now swaggers as the 10th battalion of the Royal Fusiliers or the 21st battalion of the Rifle Brigade. But thirty years ago the metropolitan and suburban militias were not held in lofty esteem. In a county militia regiment you might lay your account with finding a considerable sprinkling of younger sons of the territorial families, and probably the major would be a man who had served in the regulars, and had gone in for the local corps when he married and retired to settle down on his patrimonial estate. But the London regiments had not this stamp of officerhood. As like as not the Colonel Commandant would be a soap-boiler engaged in the active duties of his odoriferous profession. You would find no doubt ex-regulars holding commissions, but they were rather of the copper captain variety, who bound their militia commissions as phylacteries on their foreheads in evidence that their claim to the title of officer and gentleman was unimpaired by the little cloud under which they had retired from more active service. A militia commission has always been more or less of a useful item of stock-in-trade to a man living by his wits; and gentlemen of this type were sandwiched freely in the old days in the London regiments between the dashing scions of aldermen and the jeunesse dorÉe of the Stock Exchange.

Jellypod was a good sort of fellow in his way, but he did not hit it off with the Potterers. For one thing he was a married man with two children. Now in the matter of matrimony among the officers, the Potterers might have belonged to the army of the late lamented Cetewayo. Old Growler the colonel—he had been chief ever since the Crimea, and it was currently believed that he had sworn to live to a hundred and to die in the command of the Potterers, resolutely refusing promotion—old Colonel Growler had laid down the rule that no officer should marry and remain in the regiment who was not at least half-way up among the captains. A junior captain might wed, although frowned upon, on giving his pledge to send in his papers within the year; but lo! here was a cornet joining, not only with a wife, but with a wife who was a foreigner, and there was the additional aggravation of brats.

Then Jellypod, subsequently the Muleteer, had a modest confidence in himself. Among his burglars and pickpockets he had learnt foot drill thoroughly, and the first time he turned out to recruits’ drill in the barrack square, had affably set the “regimental” right in regard to a word of command. He had studied Jomini, had detected the superficiality of Hamley’s Operations of War, and had visited scientifically the battlefields of 1859 in Northern Italy. He had not been in the Potterers a week before he had tendered every officer a printed copy of an (undelivered) lecture before the United Service Institution on the utility of cavalry as a support to infantry. Before a fortnight was over he had confided to the adjutant, who—of course I mean the fine old ranker adjutant—was always very friendly and confidential with newly joined officers, that he regarded the regimental system of the Potterers as reprehensibly slack; and that he thought every one under the rank of field-officer should invariably attend morning and evening stables. One fine day after luncheon he followed the chief into the anteroom and asked him whether he would have any objections to a project he (Jellypod) had conceived, that he should give a course of evening lectures in the garrison library to the non-commissioned officers of the regiment on the German cavalry method of working by “fours.” Old Growler stared at him grimly from under his shaggy eyebrows for the space of about a minute, deliberately expectorated into the grate, then rose, and, without a word, stalked out of the room. Jellypod did not win much favour from the fat old quarter-master when he suggested to that worthy that the regimental meat should be cast every morning, until the contractor realised that the second class beef he was in the practice of sending in would no longer be accepted.

With all the goodwill in the world, Jellypod did not stand well in the eyes of the men of the troop to which he was posted as cornet. He began badly. As is usual when a new officer’s furniture arrives, a squad of men under a corporal were detailed to unload the Jellypod furniture from the vans in which it had come down from town. The work done—you may be sure the fellows had some chaff among themselves about the cradle, which presented to them a strange anomaly in being part of a cornet’s goods and chattels—the oldest soldier, as the custom is, formed up to Jellypod, and, saluting, intimated the anxiety of himself and his comrades to drink that officer’s health. Jellypod wasn’t a bit mean, but he regarded this attempt to “pike” him as an impertinence, and ordered the man about his business, threatening to report him. He did report him to the corporal, who told him bluntly he thought the “kick” quite natural—the work being outside the men’s regular duty, and it being an invariable custom to reward a fatigue-party on this kind of service with the price of a drink round. In fact the honest corporal as good as hinted that he himself felt rather dry. But Jellypod stood on the principle of the thing, and refused to contribute toward the consumption of intoxicating fluids; he himself was a teetotaler. It was a high sense of principle, again, which impelled him to refuse to fall in with the immemorial practice of paying his footing the first time he entered the riding-school. He would have stood out even against the fee to the riding-master, taking the ground that among the duties for which he drew his pay was the instruction in equitation of the officer-recruit as well as of the soldier-recruit; but old Voyage had taken his grievance to the colonel, who curtly ordered Jellypod not to let him hear any more “of this d—d nonsense.” But he stood out against the dustoor to the underlings of the riding-school. Then the grim old rough-riding sergeant swore a grizzly oath, and took the corporal and the rough-riders to witness that if Mr. Jellypod did not rue his meanness before he was dismissed riding-drill, then his name was not old Tom Bridoon. And in truth it was a bad morning’s work for Jellypod when he declined to fork out that sovereign as he trod the tan for the first time; for it came to pass that he and that same tan became and remained exceptionally intimate.

The universal wonder was why Jellypod should have come into cavalry. He was a fine-looking florid man of some seven-and-twenty, with a full round face, encircled by long chestnut whiskers. He was straight and square-shouldered, but had already begun to run into flesh, displaying a not inconsiderable protuberance in front, whence his by-name; and in point of fact exhibiting the reverse of attenuation when taken in reverse. With his round fleshy thighs, he looked just the sort of man to have a washball style of seat in any position, and bound to endure much in the effort to obtain the correct cavalry seat of the period, then much longer and less easy to acquire than now.

The Potterers hunted to a man; they would have hunted every day of the week, including Sunday, if their studs had run to it, and if there had been a sufficiency of attainable meets. The chief was the keenest of any; the prime article of his simple faith was that so long as unfortunately there was no fighting to be done, the chief end of the cavalryman was to gallop after hounds. So, the day Jellypod came to the regiment, the chief, never dreaming that there was any need to ask him whether he hunted, simply put the question, “How many hunters are you bringing; how many days a week do you care to hunt?” You might have knocked him down with a feather—he was stricken absolutely dumb, when Jellypod in the most matter-of-fact way replied:

“I am bringing no hunters, sir. I don’t think hunting is an amusement I should care about. The fact is, I really don’t know how to ride. I don’t believe I was ever on the outside of a horse in my life. Of course I must learn now that I am in a cavalry regiment; and I daresay I shall find no difficulty in purchasing a steady, docile charger.”

When he joined he had bought the first charger of the officer whose retirement created the vacancy which made room for him, a perfectly broken thoroughbred old chestnut, cunning in riding-school drill, knowing every command as if it had studied the book of the manÈge. This was a great pull for Jellypod; if only he could have kept in the saddle, the gallant old horse would have kept him right. But with “stirrups up” he couldn’t keep in the saddle had his life depended on doing so. At a walk he was all right; but as soon as the word “Trot!” was given, he was all over the place. If he hung on by his eyelids for a round or two, old Bridoon, the non-payment of footing rankling in his mind, would touch up the old chestnut with the long whip; and then Jellypod would shut his eyes and gently roll off the saddle on to the tan. The man, however, had both pluck and perseverance. He never did get his seat without stirrups, but when these were allowed to the ride, he did better; trusting to them and to the reins to an unjustifiable extent, and rolling about, as old Bridoon used to say, “like an apple in a bucket”—only the expression was mostly a good deal coarser; but coming to grief altogether with much greater rarity. To the last he was the most abject duffer at “heads and posts,” and it was well that the old chestnut carried a good head, else every time he and his rider went over the bar, the latter would have shot bodily over the former’s ears. Altogether, Jellypod had a good six months in the school before he was dismissed riding-drill, and then it was only because, as the riding-master said, he could not be bothered with him any longer.

Jellypod had developed into considerable of a martinet even before he ceased to be a recruit and blossomed forth as a “duty-soldier.” There was not an officer in the regiment who had so keen an eye for specks of rust in that awkward cranny at the back of a big bit, as it hung with specious resplendency between the burnished stirrup-irons. Trouble was no object to Jellypod in his quest after evidences of the dragoon’s perfunctoriness. He was the first officer in the British cavalry—ex-rankers in a bad temper excepted—to unfasten a buckle in order to ascertain whether that recondite crevice at the root of the tongue was free from rust. The men of his troop rejoiced to see him cured of the practice of searching for scurf in the tails of horses shown out to be passed as clean, by a kick on the knee which he received from Tom Maguire’s vicious chestnut mare. With all this bustle of thoroughness, Jellypod had no intention of posing as a tartar; he was simply full of exuberant zeal to do his duty to the extremest tittle. But he got himself, all the same, heartily disliked and a good deal despised. You see he was in such a hurry to be critical that he had not always acquainted himself with the right names of things. The whole stable burst into a roar of involuntary laughter once, when he spoke of a crupper as a “breeching”; and he “mulled it” severely on another occasion when he spoke of a horse’s “left foot.”

He was such a glutton for work that he was always ready to take “the belt” for another officer; I have known him orderly officer for a week on end, and he performed the duties of the “orderly” function in the most thorough manner. He would “take the guard” twice in the course of a night, and never omitted to make the round of the sentries with the corporal. So full of zeal was he that when living for a while in barracks during the absence of his wife at the seaside, he began the reprehensible practice of sneaking stealthily round the posts in order to detect any sentry who might be indulging in a few winks. He found it advisable, however, speedily to desist from this species of enterprise, because of an unpleasant experience he met with. Approaching a sentry, he had bidden him “give up his orders.” Now the orders to sentries are that they are to give up their orders to nobody unless accompanied by the non-commissioned officer of the guard; and the sentry refused. Jellypod, bent on testing the soldier’s knowledge of and fidelity to his orders, announced himself an officer and repeated his demand. The soldier recognised him, and saw his way to make reprisals on this man who pried by day into the tongues of buckles, and by night went on the prowl to trip up sentries.

“Here,” exclaimed the sentry, “I don’t care who you are; officer or no officer, you have no business comin’ molestin’ me on my post, an’ tryin’ to make me commit myself by givin’ up my orders. Into the sentry-box with you, or I’ll fell you with my carbine. Jump lively, or I’ll brain you!”

Jellypod was not a hero, and it was clear to him that the man was in earnest and his monkey up. Severely crestfallen, he got into the sentry-box, and then begged of the sentry to summon the sergeant of the guard. “See you d—d first,” said the soldier; “you ain’t ‘fire,’ so I’ve no call to give ‘immediate alarm.’ You’ll stop there and cool till the relief comes round, and that will be in about an hour and a half.”

There was no help for it, Jellypod had to dree his weird. When the sergeant came with the relief, he wanted the sentry made a prisoner of for insubordination and threatening violence to his superior officer; but the sergeant refused, saying he considered the man had acted within his duty. He put the occurrence into his report; and next forenoon Jellypod was sent for to the orderly room, and had the opportunity of realising with what emphasis and fertility of invective old Growler could administer a wigging. He never skirmished around any more among the night sentries, and for at least a week desisted from screwing his eyeglass into the crevices of big bits and turning buckles inside out. The chief was always down on him, but worse than ever after this episode. Two days after it, out at squadron drill, he told him he rode like a cross between a tailor and a sack, and sent him back to riding-school till further orders.

The truth was that the chief was most anxious to see the back of Jellypod, and the aspiration was shared in by every officer in the regiment. He was not detested; it was recognised that there was nothing of the actual cad about him; but the feeling was intense that he was the wrong man in the wrong place as an officer in the easy old confraternal Potterers, who did not believe in new-fangled notions, and who, as regarded most of their professional ways, had moved very little since they charged in the Union Brigade at Waterloo. Colonel Growler was a just man, and under no temptation would he resort to tyranny, or allow his officers to indulge in hazing; but he was not backward in administering strong hints to Jellypod that he was not in his proper sphere as a cornet in the Potterers. As soon as that subaltern was dismissed from riding-school, it became imperative that he should provide himself with a second charger—indeed he ought to have done so earlier. Beast after beast was sent him on approval, any of which he thought quite good enough, and it is true that any of them was good enough for the price which was Jellypod’s figure. But the right vests in the colonel of a cavalry regiment to pass or reject horses intended for officers’ chargers; and Growler ruthlessly cast candidate after candidate for the position of Jellypod’s second charger. At last he was told he must get a proper second charger, and no more nonsense; Jellypod piteously urged that it was the colonel who was standing in the way of his possessing that requisite animal.

While matters stood thus, the Potterers got the route. I should have said they had been in Newbridge for a couple of years, and now they were ordered to Birmingham, Coventry, and Weedon. Jellypod’s troop was in the detachment assigned to Weedon under the command of the major. Jellypod, whose first charger was lame, went by train into Dublin, where the detachment spent the night before embarkation. Next morning he appeared in complete marching order, on the back of a big underbred young horse, as soft as butter, for it was just off the grass, and with quarters as round—well, as Jellypod’s own. The beast fretted itself into a lather on the march down to the North Wall, where, to the dismay of Jellypod, Colonel Growler was very much in evidence to see the detachment duly off. The chief no sooner caught sight of Jellypod’s mount than he denounced it as a cross between a cow and a camel, and cast it on the spot, so Jellypod crossed St. George’s Channel a cavalry officer on the line of march without a horse to his name.

He was the only subaltern with his troop, and it was thought imperative by the major and his captain that he should go on the road. The only resource was to dismount one of the men, and put Jellypod on the troop-horse. There was a good deal of malice in the selection of the quadruped. Throughout the regiment “F. 23” had a malign reputation for unapproachable roughness. She was satirically known as “the Bonesetter,” and was understood to have dislocated every articulation in the framework of one recruit, and jerked the teeth out of the head of another. This was the mount which on the Liverpool jetty was given to Jellypod, to carry him for nine long marches till Weedon should be reached.

“F. 23” was a pleasant horse at a walk, and not at all a bad-looking beast in the summer time, when her coat was glossy. Jellypod clearly rather fancied himself as he paced up Compton Street under the eyes of the shop-girls. As soon as the town was cleared the trumpet sounded “Trot!” and his self-complacency rapidly disappeared. Apart from her roughness, “F. 23” was a hot old jade, and stiffly plunged and bucked as she fought against the officer’s heavy hands tugging and jerking at the curb as he rolled and floundered all over the saddle, while the perspiration streamed from under his helmet. One need not dwell on the agonies of that march: suffice it to say that when Cornet Jellypod woodenly dismounted in front of the Grosvenor Hotel in the ancient city of Chester, the world has seldom contained a more saddle-sick man. As soon as saddles were removed, information came from the stable that the day’s work had given “F. 23” a sore back, and that it was impossible that she could be ridden during the rest of the march.

Jellypod felt very like intimating that it was impossible that he could ride during the rest of the march. But he was of a resolute spirit, and first arnica and afterwards cunningly moistened pipeclay judiciously applied had improved matters by next morning. A second trooper was dismounted, upon whose horse Jellypod performed the second day’s march to Market Drayton. The paces of this beast were suave and easy compared with those of the “Bonesetter,” but Jellypod rolled about so in the saddle in the effort to favour his chafes, that when the day’s march was over mount No. 2 was also reported to have a sore back. It was then that his captain, previously only grumpy, permitted himself the use of the strongest language in addressing the unfortunate Jellypod. This captain was known in the regiment by the pleasing appellation of “Hell-fire Jack,” on account of the fervour of his objurgations when the spirit moved him. On this occasion the spirit moved him very much indeed, and rendered his remarks wholly unquotable. Suffice it to say that he swore Jellypod should have no further opportunity of bedevilling troop horses; but should be compelled to tramp on foot the rest of the way to Weedon, leading the two beasts which he had used up in as many days. This was a brutum fulmen; no doubt the captain would have been glad to carry out his threat; but the major pointed out that it would not do. So Jellypod was permitted to finish the journey by train, and his abrasions were all but whole by the time the detachment rode up the slope by the military prison, and defiled through the fine old gateway of wrought-iron that leads into the Weedon barrack-yard.

A few months later the Potterers quitted the midland stations, and were concentrated in the lines at the Queen’s Hotel end of Aldershot North Camp. A very brief experience of the Long Valley sufficed for Jellypod. He had not nerve enough for a troop leader in a charge over its broken and dust-smothered surface. One day he pulled his horse back on to him in a half-hearted attempt to jump one of the little cuts which the rain-storms wash out in the friable black dust, and as he lay prone in the V-shaped trough of it, a couple of squadrons rode over him. Next day he opened negotiations for an exchange to India, and presently he was gazetted to one of the ex-Company’s hussar regiments.

Jellypod appeared to thrive in India. He had got his lieutenancy before his exchange, and some two or three years later an opportune snap of cholera made a captain of him. But his great chance came when Sir Robert Napier set himself to organise that Abyssinian expedition which brought him his fairly earned peerage. Jellypod—I ought to say here that I believe the familiar old Potterer nickname did not follow him to India—had the luck to get a special service billet. It did not promise much glory, since its function was the command of the mule transport train of one of the divisions, but he was thankful for minor mercies and accepted it with avidity. Now as a beast of burden the mule has its idiosyncrasies and peculiarities which, it is averred with considerable show of authority, no white man has ever fully comprehended. If this be indeed so, our friend was the exception that proves the rule. He seemed to have a natural affinity with mules, and could do anything with them he pleased. No Alabama nigger ever had a closer rapprochement with the mule than had this gallant officer; and it was the universal recognition of this accomplishment that earned for him the sobriquet of “the Muleteer,” by which hereafter I shall denominate him.

He was zeal itself. Staveley somewhat roughly sat on his project of giving evening lectures on the sandy beach of Annesley Bay to the Smytches, Rock Scorpions, Cypriotes, Syrians, Fellaheen, and other miscellaneous scum of the Levant who were serving as mule-drivers, on the expediency of the construction of a common language to be used in addressing the mules in their charge. I have reason to believe that the story was a “shave,” that he sent in a memorial to Sir Robert Napier, suggesting that a number of mules of both sexes should be left behind in the Abyssinian villages, with intent that a stock of transport animals should be thus propagated. But he certainly was a most zealous and active transport officer. It is reported of him that on one day he personally flogged upwards of three hundred mules up the steep slope on the landward side of Zula. Had there been any fighting in the Abyssinian expedition—it is really the case, I believe, that one man was killed—he of course would have been out of it in the rear among the baggage. But he was no greater distance off the final amusement than the south side of the Bashilo; he was mentioned in despatches, as is the modern fashion in regard to every one above the rank of lance-corporal; the Director of Transport strongly recommended him for “extent and value of assistance,” and the Muleteer looked forward with a modest confidence to a brevet majority, and thought it not unlikely that he would get the C.B. as well. The Muleteer had the happy fortune to live, not in the bad old days, but in the good new days. In the bad old days, the only service that assured to a man a brevet—if he came out alive—was to lead a forlorn hope. Then, an officer might own a carcase as full of holes as a cullender, and never have the impertinence to dream of a brevet. The Napier brothers, for instance, got pretty well shot to pieces in the Peninsular war. Charles was a major at Vimiera in 1808; he was still a major after Fuentes de OÑoro in 1811, never having missed a battle, and having been wounded six times. George got his captaincy in 1804; he was all through the Peninsular fighting, from Corunna to Toulouse, in which latter battle, fought in 1814, he was but a substantive major, having in the interval lost an arm and been wounded otherwise repeatedly. Henry Havelock soldiered twenty-nine years before he obtained the rank of a field-officer. The officer of these brighter days lives under a rÉgime the virtual head of which was a full major-general in twenty years after he got his first commission. Nowadays, every staff officer who has been within sound of a skirmish, the wind blowing his way, gets his brevet as a matter of course. There is a fortunate young gentleman in the service to-day (he is in “the ring,” of course) who has three medals for as many campaigns, the C.B., the Khedive’s Octopus, and the Osmanlie, who has been the recipient of two steps in rank by brevet, and who has never seen a shot fired in anger.

Well, the Muleteer was earning his Abyssinian laurels a few years before “the ring” became the pride and ornament of the British army, else, supposing him to have been of the elect, he no doubt would have got the C.B. As it was, he got a brevet majority, and when the expedition returned to India, he said farewell to regimental duty and got a billet on the staff; and such was his good fortune, that for some ten years he continued to hold staff appointments with perfect satisfaction to himself, and with no perceptible detriment to the interests of the service. Being on the Madras side, he gradually fell into the easy-going fashion of the “benighted Presidency”; no doubt his zeal had not departed from him, but it had fallen latent. His portliness had increased with years and ease, and it was only once in a blue moon that he was seen in the saddle. A second brevet had come his way in some inexplicable fashion, and he was now for some time past a lieutenant-colonel. But his substantive rank still remained that of captain, and as his original Indian regiment had gone home and he had exchanged into its successor, so as to keep on in his staff billet, he was regimentally a very junior captain. But this gave him no disquietude, since nothing was further from his intention than to revert to regimental duty.

I don’t quite know how it happened, but in negotiating a second exchange so as to keep his staff berth, he somehow missed stays; found himself all at once on half-pay, and no longer in staff employ. The story was that he was manoeuvred out of the brigade-majorship, or whatever it was he held, by an intrigue at Presidency headquarters, where the post he had been occupying was wanted for somebody else. Anyhow, the poor Muleteer had no alternative but to return to England. He came back very disconsolately, and tried in vain for some staff employment. He would have left the service altogether, if he could have found anything to do worth his while in civilian life, but nothing offered. He thought himself too poor to scratch along on half-pay, and made interest for reinstatement to full pay and duty. His substantive rank being still that of captain merely, he could of course aspire to no higher regimental position; and one fine day he was gazetted to a troop in the old familiar Potterers. Of course he came in as junior captain. Certainly as a junior captain he was a good deal of an anachronism, for he was a grandfather, he weighed sixteen stone, there was a deep tinge of gray now in the chestnut whiskers, and he was senior in the army to the commanding officer of the regiment. But now in the Potterers, he met with a good deal of consideration. Most of the old hands who remembered him in his cockolorum days were now out of the regiment. Old Growler was by this time a lieutenant-general; the major of his early days had gone into brewing; the adjutant was drilling a yeomanry corps; and the quarter-master had retired on his plunder.

The regular drill season was over, and the Potterers had come from Brighton to Aldershot, exchanging with a regiment that had borne the heat and burden of the summer in flying columns and Long Valley field-days. So it seemed that the Muleteer had at all events a quiet winter in front of him, before the season should come round when he should have to encounter the chances of the Long Valley, the pitfalls of the Fox Hills, and the grips and fissures of the Devil’s Jumps. But it happened that early in October a continental cavalry officer of distinction visited England, and orders came down from Pall Mall for a field-day of the Aldershot cavalry brigade in honour of the stranger. The general commanding the brigade was away on leave, shooting grouse in Scotland. The three regiments paraded, and lo! the junior captain of the Potterers, senior as he was in army rank to any other officer on the ground, quitted his subsidiary position of squadron leader in the Potterers, rode out to the front, and assumed command of the brigade.

It must quite frankly be allowed that he made a deuce of a mess of it. The Duke addressed him in those bland phrases and mild tones which are so characteristic of the head of the British army when things do not go smoothly. The Muleteer, for his part, lost his temper as well as his head, and pitched vehemently into his own regiment, denouncing it for all sorts of faults and shortcomings. The lieutenant-colonel commanding it bore his expletives with a grim submissive silence, biding his time. At length, the Duke and the Muleteer both equally hoarse, the distinguished stranger fluent in encomia while an amused smile played over his features, the field-day came to an end. The Muleteer ceased from his temporary pride of place as acting brigadier-general, and reverted to his position as junior captain of the Potterers; and that honest old corps stolidly returned to barracks. No sooner had the men dismounted than “officers’ call” was sounded. The officers, still with the grime of the Long Valley on their faces, crowded into the orderly room, where they found the chief already seated in his chair, with that look in his face which it wore when he was not amiable. He directed the Muleteer to come to the front, and thus addressed him:— “When in command of the brigade to-day, you used, sir, a considerable variety of forcible expressions in the denunciation of the regiment which I have the honour to command. To some extent, I am prepared to admit the force of your strictures, although it might be the opinion of an impartial critic that the fault did not wholly lie with the regiment. The squadron of which your own troop, sir, was a part, was the chief sinner in slackness and blundering. You will, sir, till further orders, take that squadron out into the Long Valley for drill every morning, from nine to eleven. And, sir, I observed to-day that your seat on horseback was excessively bad, and that when your charger knocked about a bit, you were all over the place. You will, therefore, until further orders, go to riding-school every morning, from seven to eight, along with the junior class of recruits. That is all I wished to say. Good-morning, gentlemen.”

The same afternoon the Muleteer sent in his papers, and next morning he went away on leave, pending his retirement from the service. I believe he is now living in the Poictiers district, engaged in the occupation of breeding mules.