cholera only to fall a victim to fever. The news of my father’s death was, I believe, the immediate cause of the relapse in which she died.

And so I became an orphan.

Shortly afterwards the regiment was ordered home, and the Bullers took me with them.

CHAPTER IV.

SALES—MATTERS OF PRINCIPLE—MRS. MINCHIN QUARRELS WITH THE BRIDE—MRS. MINCHIN QUARRELS WITH EVERYBODY—MRS. MINCHIN IS RECONCILED—THE VOYAGE HOME—A DEATH ON BOARD.

I only remember a little of our voyage home in the troop-ship, but I have heard so much of it, from the elder Buller girls and the ladies of the regiment, that I seem quite familiar with all that happened; and I hardly know now what I remember myself, and what has been recalled or suggested to me by hearing the other ladies talk.

There was no lack of subjects for talk when the news came that the regiment was ordered home. As Aunt Theresa repeatedly remarked, “There are a great many things to be considered.” And she considered them all day long—by word of mouth.

The Colonel (that is, the new Colonel)—he had just returned from leave in the hills—and his wife behaved rather shabbily, it was thought. “But,” as Mrs. Minchin said, “what could you expect? They say she was the daughter of a wholesale draper in the City. And trade in the blood always peeps out.” We knew for certain that before there was a word said about the regiment going home, it had been settled that the Colonel’s wife should go to England, where her daughters were being educated, and take the two youngest children with her. Her passage in the mail-steamer was all but taken, if not quite. And then, when they heard of the troop-ship, she stayed to go home in that. “Money can be no object to them,” said Mrs. Minchin, “for one of the City people belonging to her has died lately, and left her—I can’t tell you how many thousands. Indeed, they’ve heaps of money, and now he’s got the regiment he ought to retire. And I must say, I think it’s very hard on you, dear Mrs. Buller. With all your family, senior officer’s wife’s accommodation would be little enough, for a long voyage.”

“Which is no reason why my wife should have better accommodation than she is entitled to, more than any other lady on board,” observed Uncle Buller. “The Quartermaster’s wife has more children than we have, and you know how much room she will get.”

“Quartermaster’s wife!” muttered Mrs. Minchin. “She would have been accommodated with the women of the regiment if we had gone home three months ago (at which time Quartermaster Curling was still only a sergeant).”

Uncle Buller made no reply. He was not fond of Mrs. Minchin, and he never disputed a point with her.

One topic of the day was “sales.” We all had to sell off what we did not want to take home, and the point was to choose the right moment for doing so.

“I shan’t be the first,” said Aunt Theresa decidedly. “The first sales are always failures somehow. People are depressed. Then they know that there are plenty more to come, and they hang back. But further on, people have just got into an extravagant humour, and would go bargain-hunting to fifty sales a day. Later still, they find out that they’ve got all they want.”

“And a great deal that they don’t want,” put in Uncle Buller.

“Which is all the same thing,” said Aunt Theresa. “So I shall sell about the middle.” Which she did, demanding her friends’ condolences beforehand on the way in which her goods and chattels would be “given away,” and receiving their congratulations afterwards upon the high prices that they fetched.

To do Aunt Theresa justice, if she was managing, she was quite honest.

[Eleanor is shocked by some of the things I say about people in our own rank of life. She believes that certain vulgar vices, such as cheating, lying, gluttony, petty gossip, malicious mischief-making, etc., are confined to the lower orders, or, as she wisely and kindly phrases it, to people who know no better. She laughs at me, and I laugh at myself, when I say (to support my own views) that I know more of the world than she does; since what I know of the world beyond this happy corner of it I learned when I was a mere child. But though we laugh, I can remember a good deal. I have heard polished gentlemen lie, at a pinch, like the proverbial pick-pocket, and pretty ladies fib as well as servant-girls. Of course, I do not mean to say that as many ladies as servant-girls tell untruths. But Eleanor would fain believe that the lie which Solomon discovered to be “continually on the lips of the untaught” is not on the lips of those who “know better” at all. As to dishonesty, too, I should be sorry to say that customers cheat as much as shopkeepers, but I do think that many people who ought to “know better” seem to forget that their honour as well as their interest is concerned in every bargain. The question then arises, do people in our rank know so much better on these points of moral conduct than those below them? If Eleanor and her parents are “old-fashioned” (and the boys think us quite behind the times), I fancy, that perhaps high principle and a nice sense of honour are not so well taught now as they used to be. Noble sentiments are not the fashion. The very phrase provokes a smile of ridicule. But I do not know whether the habit of uttering ignoble ones in “chaff” does not at last bring the tone of mind down to the low level. It is so terribly easy to be mean, and covetous, and selfish, and cowardly untrue, if the people by whose good opinion one’s character lives will comfortably confess that they also “look out for themselves,” and “take care of Number One,” and think “money’s the great thing in this world,” and hold “the social lie” to be a necessary part of social intercourse. I know that once or twice it has happened that young people with whom we have been thrown have said things which have made high-principled Eleanor stand aghast in honourable horror; and that that speechless indignation of hers has been as much lost upon them as the touch of a feather on the hide of a rhinoceros. Eleanor is more impatient than I am on such subjects. I who have been trained in more than one school myself, am sorry for those who have never known the higher teaching. Eleanor thinks that modesty, delicacy of mind and taste, and uprightness in word and deed, are innate in worthy characters. Where she finds them absent, she is apt to dilate her nostrils, and say, in that low, emphatic voice which is her excited tone, “There are some things that you cannot put into anybody!” and so turn her back for ever on the offender. Or, as she once said to a friend of the boys, who was staying with us, in the heat of argument, “I supposed that honourable men, like poets, are born, not made.” I, indeed, do believe these qualities to be in great measure inherited; but I believe them also to come of training, and to be more easily lost than Eleanor will allow. She has only lived in one moral atmosphere. I think that the standard of a family or a social circle falls but too easily; and in all humbleness of mind, I say that I have reason to believe that in this respect, as in other matters, elevation and amendment are possible.

However, this is one of the many subjects we discuss, rocking and pacing the kitchen to the howling of the wind. We have confessed that our experience is very small, and our opinions still unfixed in the matter, so it is unlikely that I shall settle it to my own, or anybody’s