“Well, I’m glad to see you, my lad. Don’t you take no notice of what I said before those louts. You’re all right; you’ll have to go through the course, but I can soon report you as being pretty perfect. You could hold your own now with most of the fellows in the band.”
“I think I can soon get on,” said Dick, who felt glad of a friendly word.
“Of course you can. You well-educated chaps know your right leg from your left; lots of these fellows never seem to. You’ll be all right there in the band.”
He nodded and walked away, while Dick was soon after obeying the dinner call, and forcing himself to bear his grievance, as he sat down to partake of the roughly-cooked coarse beef and potatoes which formed the day’s rations, and wondered how long it would be before he grew hardened to his new life and able to forget the many little refinements and luxuries to which he had been accustomed.
Chapter Seventeen.
Quavering among Crotchets.
“It is very horrid in some things,” thought Dick Smithson as he would think of his position at night in the comparative silence of his narrow bed—comparative silence, for each of his brother bandsmen had a habit of performing nocturnes on nasal instruments in a way not pleasing to a weary, sleepless person—“very horrid.”
For so many things jarred: the want of privacy, the common ways of his companions, the roughness of the food, and the annoyances—petty annoyances—he had to submit to from the little bandmaster.