CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
LIFE AT THE STATION.
The late supper in the plain, homely room--where the table was on trestles, the chairs were stools, and the arm-chairs ingeniously cut out of casks, the carpet sacking, and the hearthrug skins--and the performance in the way of sleep on his arrival, interfered sadly with Nic's night's rest.
It was an hour after his father's return before they all retired; and as soon as Nic was in his room he felt not the slightest inclination for bed.

Everything was so new and fresh; the brilliant moonlight lit up the tract outside with such grand effects that the first thing he did was to take the home-made tallow candle out of its socket and hold it upside down till it was extinct, and then put it back.
The room was now all bright in one part, black shadow in the others; and he was going to the open window to look out, but just then an idea struck him, and he took up his gun, closed the pan, drew the flint hammer to half-cock, and proceeded to load.

He carefully measured his charge of powder in the top of the copper flask, and poured it into the barrel, in happy unconsciousness that in the future ingenious people would contrive not only guns that would open at the breech for a cartridge containing in itself powder, shot, and explosive cap, to be thrust in with one movement, but magazine rifles that could be loaded for many shots at once.
Then on the top of the powder he rammed down a neatly cut-out disk of felt, the ramrod, drawn from its loops and reversed, compressing the air in the barrel, driving the powder out through the touch-hole into the pan, and making a peculiar sound running in a kind of gamut: pash-- pesh--pish--posh--poosh--push--pud--pod--por--with the wind all out and the powder compressed hard down by the wad.

Next a little cylindrical shovel full of shot was extracted from the belt, whose spring closed as the measure was drawn out, and the shot trickled gently into the barrel, glistening in the moonlight like globules of quicksilver.

Another wad was rammed down; the pan opened and found full of the black grains, and the ramrod replaced in its loops behind the barrel, the gun being stood in the corner beside the bed ready for emergencies in that rough land.
Nic's next proceeding was to listen and find that the murmur of voices heard beyond the partition had ceased, and he slipped off his shoes and stepped softly to the open window.
The flowers smelt deliciously in the cool, soft night air, and he looked out, leaning his arms on the sill to realise more thoroughly that he was in the place he had so often longed to see when he did a similar thing at the Friary in far-off Kent.
It seemed impossible, but it was true enough.