Seeing one day a real
live, if diminutive, Lancer trumpeter listening to the band
playing in the Castle yard, I ran down and consulted him as to the
best means of attaining my desire. The small trumpeter was not
particularly intelligent, and was unable to help me. Though of
tender years, he was regrettably lacking in refinement, for his
conversation consisted chiefly of an endless repetition of three
or four words, not one of which I had ever heard before. Carefully
treasuring these up, as having a fine martial smack about them
suitable to the military career I then proposed embracing, I, in
all innocence, fired off one of the trumpeter's full-flavoured
expressions at my horror-stricken family during luncheon, to be
at once ordered out of the room, and severely punished afterwards.
We all know that "what the soldier said" is not legal evidence; in
this painful fashion I also learnt that "what the trumpeter said"
is not held to be a valid excuse for the use of bad language by a
small boy.
In the late autumn of 1890 Admiral Sir Edmund Fremantle brought
his flagship, the Boadicea, right up the Hooghly, and moored her
alongside the Maidan.
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