George Tomkyns Chesney

“ Dear me! what changes one sees in dress, to be sure!" continued Dumble, philosophically. "How do you like the new tunic, Passey?"
"Have there been many changes in the uniform of the army since you entered the service, major?" asked young Raugh, to whom the subject of dress was one at present of leading interest, and to whom it had been a blow and disappointment, on joining the regiment a few weeks before, to find that the officers had already taken to white jackets, and that there would be no opportunity of airing his brand-new scarlet coatee till the next cold season. ”

“ He would sit at mess over the bottle till gunfire the next morning, and then his charger would be brought to the door, and he would ride off to parade as steady and fresh as if he had been in bed all night. He was a man of very good family, too, was Poynings; he had a cousin an Irish peer. Ah, those were fine times! wheat was down then to forty seers, and you might keep a horse for five rupees a month. The 22d lost a hundred men from cholera that very year."
"Ah, what a splendid corps the 22d was!" observed Passey, after a pause, by way of keeping up the conversation. ”

“ Look here, my good sir," he continued, bringing down his hand with a thump on the mess-table, "you have cholera on the plains of Bengal, and you have cholera on the highlands of Thibet, fifteen thousand feet above the sea, haven't you? Well, then, I say, isn't the thing as plain as a pike-staff? It's the variations of temperature that cause cholera, of course, and I don't care what anybody else says."
"The cholera is an awful thing when it breaks out in a European regiment," observed the major after a pause. ”

“ Even study is impossible. I can read no longer for reading's sake — shall I never find any useful work to do?" Nor was his frame of mind made more contented by a letter received that day with the English mail, distributed to the station during the afternoon, which his servant had brought down to the bath-house, and which Yorke read as he dressed after his plunge. ”

“ Ah, well, no doubt, a university degree is a very nice thing — it gives a stamp to a man, so to speak; but I think nowadays the rising men in the profession go more to the London hospitals, and come out as M.R.C.S. That is what I did myself. ”

“ A few minutes passed in the sepoys' lines at daybreak sufficed to dispose of all regimental business, when such of the officers as were present with the regiment assembled to drink tea on the shady side of the mess bungalow, and discuss the extremely small points of interest offered by the local papers being chiefly tantalizing accounts of picnics and cricket-matches at the hill-stations, till the advancing sun came over the roof and drove them to the shelter of their respective houses. ”

“ Brevet-Major Passey, who was living en garçon at the mess, his wife and daughter having gone to the hills; Grumbull, the doctor, doing likewise in the absence of his family in England, with a guest seated by him, a young medical friend, who was passing through Mustaphabad on his way to join his regiment; Captain Braddon puffing his cigar, grim and silent ”