On a patch of turf up a neighbouring lane Oswald and Co. took up their residence this summer.

The troopers called him Oswald for some unknown reason, but I doubt if that was his baptismal name, and I doubt if he was ever baptized.

Oswald was a tall bony grizzled child of the Open.

Years ago he would have been dismissed briefly as a tramp, but we know better now; we have read our Georgian poets and we know that such folk do not perambulate the country stealing fowls and firing ricks from any dislike of settled labour, but because they have heard the call of far horizons, belles etoiles and great spaces.

The Co. consisted of a woolly donkey which carried Oswald’s portmanteau when he trekked, and a hairy dog which provided him with company and conversation.

The donkey browsed, unfettered, about the roadside, taking the weather as it came; but Oswald and the dog, degenerates, sheltered under a wigwam of saplings and old sacks.

The wigwam being four feet long and Oswald six, he had to telescope like a tortoise to get fully under cover; sometimes he forgot his feet and left them outside all night in the dew, but, as he had no boots to spoil, this didn’t matter much.

Not having any business to attend to he lay abed very late.  Our troopers, riding at ease en route to the drill grounds, would toss their lighted cigarette-ends at the protruding bare feet.  A grizzled head telescoping out of the other end of the wigwam and a husky voice calling down celestial fury upon them, would signalise a hit.

The Adjutant was for having Oswald moved on; we should be missing things presently, he warned—­saddle-blankets, rifles, horses, perhaps the portcullis.  However, the O.C. would have none of it; he maintained that this constant menace at our gates kept the sentries on the qui vive and accustomed them to practically Active Service conditions.

So all the summer the wigwam remained on the turf-patch and the sentries on the qui vive.

How Oswald existed is a mystery—­probably on manna, for he toiled not neither span, and if he stole for a living it was not from us.

He spent his mornings in bed, his afternoons reclining on the bank behind his residence, puffing at his dudheen and watching our recruits going through the hoops with the amused contempt that a gentleman of leisure naturally feels for the working classes.

At the end of September, Freddy, the Benedick, finding himself in the orderly-room and forgetting what had brought him there, applied for leave as a matter of habit, and, walking out again, promptly forgot all about it.  Freddy is given that way.  Apparently the Orderly Room was finding time heavy on their hands that morning, for machinery was set in motion, and in due course the astonished Freddy discovered himself with permission to go to blazes for seven days and a warrant to London in his pocket.