pleasant and harmonious meal comes to an end,
does assault him, and is put under arrest forthwith.
Apologies are tendered, but they won't
do, and Veterinary Surgeon Anthony is dismissed
the service—the cornet getting off scot-free;
though he certainly inaugurated the dispute,
and though those words " now, boys, we 've got
him," if he really uttered them, certainly were
rather suggestive of a plot to get the veterinary
surgeon out of the regiment.

One or two more instances showing the
extraordinary kind of offences of which these
gentlemen of the British army will sometimes
suspect each other, shall bring our examination of
these queer military scandals to a close. There
is a story extant, the exact truth concerning
which no merely human intellect can arrive at
with any certainty, but which concerns an
officer belonging to that regiment of dragoons
commanded by the renowned Colonel Crawley
of the Mhow court-martial—of which last by
the bye, not a word has been said in this article,
simply because the reader already has by heart
everything that can be said about that very
celebrated cause. The story with which we
have to do is of more recent date, and is all
about—Heaven save the mark—a couple of
numbers of the Court Journal—an innocent
periodical, one would have thought, incapable,
in any way of setting a regiment of dragoons
by the ears. The intelligible points connected
with this "difficulty" are soon disposed of.
Two numbers of the Court Journal had been,
it seems, placed on a certain day on the table
of the mess reading-room, from which place
they were almost immediately afterwards carried
off by some person, or persons, unknown, and
were not returned. This being an infringement
of rules, a form was prepared and sent round
to each of the officers, stating what had
happened, and containing an inquiry whether the
periodical in question had been temporarily
removed from the mess-room by any one of the
officers thus addressed. An application to
which they all—including a Lieutenant Davies,
concerning whom this fable is narrated—
returned an answer in the negative. Under these
difficult circumstances it is that we next find
Sergeant Hand, who has charge of the reading-
room and its contents, having recourse to a
proceeding, which, if taken on his own
responsibility, as he says it was, was certainly a strong
measure for a non-commissioned officer to
venture on—nothing less in short than placing a
native boy behind a glass-door which commanded
the reading-room, to watch every one of the
officers who should come into the room, and
observe whether any one of them would bring back
the Court Journals, and endeavour to replace
them on the library table without being observed.
The thing was done however; the native boy
went to his post of observation, and, according
to his evidence, had not watched long before he
saw " Davies Sahib " enter the room, take up
a newspaper, pretending to read it, and then,
after furtively looking round to see if he was
observed, drew a couple of newspapers from
under his jacket, and thrust them under a pile
of " Bell's Lives," which lay convenient to his
hand.

So far, the story is intelligible enough, but
from this point it becomes involved in such a
prodigious tangle of misrepresentation, hard
swearing, tattling, and small gossiping, that
truly it seems as if a " Daniel come to judgment,"
would have but a poor chance of getting
at the rights and wrongs of it. There is a
Corporal Lucas who gets into the plot, about
this time, who was certainly in two, if not
more, places at once—Corporal Lucas, who
was in an adjoining room, and whom the native
boy declares that he went and fetched, in order
that the corporal might witness the proceedings
of Davies Sahib which had already taken place;
and which, strangest of all, he (Corporal Lucas)
did witness, according to his own statement,
made with an amount of circumstantiality
which reminds one of Sheridan's " little bronze
bust," and the "double letter from
Northamptonshire." The conglomeration is indeed
very bewildering, but it becomes more so
afterwards, when Mrs. Davies comes forward and
asserts that there could be no motive for her
husband's abstracting the Court Journals, inasmuch
as this inestimable periodical was
regularly lent to them, as it arrived, by a friend
at the station who was in the habit of taking
it in. But what is all this to the delirium
in which the unhappy individual who has
wandered into this case, finds himself involved,
when he reads the evidence of another witness
—a civilian this time—a Mr. Brockman, who
asserts that the faithless Lucas came to him
on a certain occasion and told him that all the
evidence which he (Lucas) had given against
Lieutenant Davies was false, and that he had
been compelled to give it by certain regimental
potentates who could, and would, have ruined
him if he had disobeyed. And here a new
element is introduced into the affair—a
suggestion that this charge has been trumped up
in consequence of a feeling of animosity
entertained towards Mr. Davies by one of his brother
officers, between whom and Davies dispeace
had arisen, because his (the brother officer's)
wife, had " said things" about his ( Davies's)
wife, intimating that she was "no lady," whereupon
Mr. Davies declined to return the brother
officer's salute, and the brother officer
appealed to the colonel, and venom became
developed in the brother officer's bosom, and
so it all ended, according to one of the many
versions of the story which are extant, in the
Court Journal business described above.

Here, then, is a case in which an officer and
a gentleman is supposed by other officers and
gentlemen to have been capable of purloining a
couple of numbers of the Court Journal. We
will follow it up with another, in which tastes
of a less intellectual kind are imputed to the
accused person.

In the " modern instance" before us—and it
is a very modern one, indeed, the events to be
detailed being of the most recent occurrence—