54 HORSE, FOOT, AND DRAGOOxNS. 



we have passed on our short run down from London, and in- 

 stead of the usual sober bustle of the average English railway- 

 station, with its little knot of arriving and departing passen- 

 gers, a score of scarlet coats with bright buttons, perhaps the 

 white fatigue -jacket and swinging kilts of a barekneed High- 

 lander or two, or the yellow braided and befrogged uniform of 

 a horse -artilleryman, furnish a bright contrast to the brown 

 corduroys of the railway officials and the quiet costumes of the 

 few civilians in the little crowd. Confiding myself and my 

 luggage to the tender care of a hansom cabman, the "double" 

 of his metropolitan cousin, I am rapidly whirled along through 

 a maze of rather shabby streets, lined with shops and small 

 dwelling-houses, until, skirting the green lawns in front of the 

 Royal Artillery barracks, we turn sharply up a hill and on to a 

 broad, dusty, white road leading past the cantonments. 



It is a bright, sunny morning, one of those rare English 

 summer days, peaceful and calm, the blue sky broken with 

 fleecy, drifting clouds casting their shadows on the purple, 

 heather- covered hills and tawny, sandy valleys, and, by the ever- 

 changing masses of light and shade, lending even to the mo- 

 notonous rows of brown huts and yellow brick barracks of 

 Aldershot Camp something of color and of the picturesque. 

 There is little stirring in the straight side- streets running at 

 rieht angles with our road, and lined with their rows of huts, 

 intersecting each other with the regularity of the squares on a 

 checker-board, as it is the hour of drill, and the troops are out 

 on the parades or off at musketry drill, and we can hear now 

 and then the far-off reports of their rifles or the distant blare 

 of a bugle, while behind the white tents, gleaming brightly in 

 the sunlight away over under Peak Hill, where some troops are 

 lying under canvas, the cloud of dust rising from the " Dust 

 Hole " betokens the presence there of the artillerymen at their 



