Ho, don't you grieve for me,
My lovely Mary Ann,
For I'll marry you yet on a fourp'ny bit,
As a time-expired ma-a-an
Barrack Room Ballad.
AN awful thing has happened! My friend, Private Mulvaney, who went
home in the Serapis, time-expired, not very long ago, has come
back to India as a civilian! It was all Dinah Shadd's fault. She
could not stand the poky little lodgings, and she missed her
servant Abdullah more than words could tell. The fact was that the
Mulvaneys had been out here too long, and had lost touch of
England.
Mulvaney knew a contractor on one of the new Central India lines,
and wrote to him for some sort of work. The contractor said that
if Mulvaney could pay the passage he would give him command of a
gang of coolies for old sake's sake. The pay was eighty-five
rupees a month, and Dinah Shadd said that if Terence did not
accept she would make his life a "basted purgathory." Therefore
the Mulvaneys came out as "civilians," which was a great and
terrible fall; though Mulvaney tried to disguise it by saying that
he was "Ker'nel on the railway line, an' a consequinshal man."
He wrote me an invitation, on a tool-indent form, to visit him;
and I came down to the funny little "construction" bungalow at the
side of the line.
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