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", dash it all!" said Freddy Foggerty, "he knows me, and I shall be tried for desertion!"

Freddy Foggerty was a confectioner on a small scale in the Borough Road. He did not begin by being a confectioner, for his career had been a chequered one, and his ups and downs had been many. He began life as a Gentleman's Baby, a situation which he filled for about three years with much credit, when he found himself promoted to the rank and standing of a Gentleman's Little Boy—a position which carried with it an improved scale of dietary, and an emolument of twopence per week, on a Judge's tenure, that is to say, dum se bene gesserit. He passed through the various grades of boyhood and adolescence without having distinguished himself, except as a remarkable and exceptionally ordinary kind of boy, with this one distinguishing feature—that he had developed no prominent characteristic of any kind whatever. At nineteen, he became a Government clerk in the Bitter Beer branch of the Malt and Hops Department of the Inland Revenue Office. In this capacity he distinguished himself by the invention of a new system of cooking accounts, but the Heads of his