‘Well, sir, we’re the only two Goojeraties left, you know, sir, and I’d like to drink your health.’
It always ended in the same way—the transfer of half-a-crown from the colonel to ‘the Boy;’ the speedy exchange of the whole sum into liquor, the most potent description preferred, a free fight, for ‘the Boy’ was quarrelsome in his cups, a temporary relegation to the guard-room, from which he was sure to be immediately released by the officer of the day. When Hanlon misconducted himself he always got off scot free. Colonel Prioleau would never punish ‘the Boy.’
‘Where’s my towney?’ Hanlon asked directly he entered the room.
They pointed to where Herbert sat disconsolate; and the dapper little soldier, who was still trim in figure, and straight as a dart, walked over to the lad and gave him a friendly pat on the back.
‘Now, young chap, you must brush up, brush up, and show yourself a man. We’ve to be comrades, you and I, and it won’t suit me to consort with a chap as is given to peek and pine. What do you call yourself?’
This was delicately put. Recruits do not always enlist under their own names; so Hanlon asked, not what Herbert was called, but what he called himself.
‘Herbert Larkins.’
‘Good; and not a bad looking chap either. Too tall—leastwise I’m afraid you’re going to grow—’
Hanlon, like many little men, hated those whose inches far exceeded his own. In the days when there had been grenadiers, it was his favourite pastime, when at all the worse for liquor, to beard the giants in their own barrack-room. He called them ‘hop-poles,’ ‘sand-bags,’ ‘wooden ramrods,’ and other opprobrious names, and his onslaughts generally ended in his being carried, bodily, to the guard-room, under some stalwart soldier’s arm. Now that the grenadier company was abolished, he disseminated his dislike, and abused every private who was more that five feet six in height.
‘Too tall, unless you stop as you are. Gin perhaps’d do it; or whiskey; or perhaps “four” ale—if you took enough of it. Fond of “four” ale, eh?’