You’ve got to stand up to our business an’ spring without snatchin’ or fuss.
D’you say that you sweat with the field-guns? By God, you must lather with us. ’Tss! ’Tss!
For you all love the screw-guns....”
Thus Mr. Kipling to the tune of the Eton Boating Song. And now a round of drinks, and song again—a song whose immortal words are unpublished, whose tunes are various, whose name is the Barrack-Gate.
“... Then the wily Gym. Instructor ...
Just outside the Barrack-Gate.”
There follows a swift catalogue of the merits of a certain Princess whose home is in a few manuscripts of an Opera, rhymed wonderfully by the hand of a master, and sung to music by Sullivan. From this obscurity a swift return is made to the simplicity of The Wives, in which it is told how the Parson’s wife, strangely clad, decorated her hat with the midshipmen’s astronomical observations—
“And in one corner of her hat
She carried the Yearly Sights.
She carried the Yearly Sights, my boys,