We have not mentioned him until now, because up to this time he had not done anything to distinguish himself beyond his messmates; but on this particular day O'Riley's star was in the ascendant, and fortune seemed to have singled him out as an object of her special attention.

He was a short man, and a broad man, and a particularly _rugged_ man--so to speak.

He was all angles and corners.

His hair stuck about his head in violently rigid and entangled tufts, rendering it a matter of wonder how anything in the shape of a hat could stick on.

His brow was a countless mass of ever-varying wrinkles, which gave to his sly visage an aspect of humorous anxiety that was highly diverting--and all the more diverting when you came to know that the man had not a spark of anxiety in his composition, though he often said he had.