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all fully impressed with the honour of the epaulette, and thinking the man who wore two instead of one the most favoured of all beings under the sun. We at length came in sight of the famous Rock. It loomed magnificently from the sea; and every glass was to the eye as the lines and batteries, that looked like teeth in its old white head, rose grimly out of the waters. The veterans of the corps were in high delight, and enumerated, with the vigour of grateful recollection, the cheapness of the wines, the snugness of the quarters, and the general laudable and illaudable pleasantries of the place. The younger listened with the respect due to experience, and, for that evening, an old red-nosed lieutenant, of whom no man had ever thought but as a lieutenant before, became the centre of a circle, a he blue-stocking, surrounded with obsequious listeners, by virtue of his pre-eminent knowledge of every wine-house in the garrison. Such is the advantage of situation!-nine-tenths of mankind, till they are placed on the spot of display, what are they but red-nosed lieutenants ?

At Gibraltar, like Thiebault in Frederick's paradise at Potsdam, we conjugated from morning till night the verb, "Je m'ennuie, tu t'ennuies, il s'ennuie," through all its persons, tenses, and moods. At length we were ordered for Egypt. Never was regiment so delighted. We supped together upon the news, and drank farewell to Gibraltar and confusion to in bumpers without measure. In the very height of our carousal, my eye dropped upon my old friend's red nose. It served me as a kind of thermometer. I observed it diminished of its usual crimson. "The spirit has fallen," thought I, "there is ill luck in the wind." I took him aside, but he was then too far gone for regular counsel; he only clasped my hand with the fervour of a fellow-drinker, and muttered out, lifting his glass with a shaking wrist, "Nothing but confoundedly bad brandy in Egypt for love or money.” We sailed-were shipwrecked on the coast of Cara

mania, and surrounded by natives. Soldiers are no great geographers; the line leave that business to the staff, the staff to the artillery, the artillery to the engineers, and the engineers to Providence. At our council, which was held on a row of knapsacks, and with one pair of trowsers among its seven sages, it was asserted, with equal show of reason, that we were in Africa, in Arabia, in Turkey, and in the Black Sea. However, our sheepskin friends were urgent for our departure.

We finally sailed for Egypt; found the French building fortifications on the shore; and, like a generous enemy, landed just where they had provided for our reception. But the world knows all this already, and I disdain to tell what every body knows: but the world does not know that we had three councils of war to settle whether the troops should land in gaiters or trowsers; and whether they should or should not carry three days' pipeclay and blacking in their knapsacks. The most valuable facts are, we see, often lost for want of our being a little behind the curtain. The famous landing was the noisiest thing conceivable. The world at a distance called it the most gallant thing; and I have no inclination to stand up against universal opinion. But whether we were fighting against the sand-hills, or the French, or the sun in his strength; whether we were going to the right, or the left, or the rear; whether we were beating or beaten, no living man could have told in two minutes after the first shot. It was all clamour, confusion, bursting of shells, dashing of water, splitting of boats, and screams of the wounded; the whole passing under a coverlet of smoke as fuliginous as ever rushed from furnace: under this "blanket of the dark," we pulled on, landed, fought, and conquered; and for our triumph, had every man his length of excellent sand for the night, the canopy of heaven for his tent, and the profoundest curses of the commissariat for his supper. On we went, day after day, fighting the French, starving, and scorching, till we found

them in our camp before day-break on the memorable 21st of March. We fought them there, as men fight in the pit of a theatre, every one for himself; the French, who are great tacticians, and never fight but for science' sake, grew tired before John Bull, who fights for the love of the thing. The Frenchman fights but to manœuvre, the Englishman manoeuvres but to fight. So, as manœuvring was out of the question, we carried the affair all after our own hearts. But this victory had its price; for it cost the army its brave old general, and it cost me my old rednosed lieutenant. We were standing within half-a-foot of each other, in front of the little ruin where the French Invincibles made a last struggle; they fired a volley before they threw themselves on their knees, according to the national custom of earning their lives, when I saw my unlucky friend tumbled head over heels, and stretched between my legs. There was no time for thinking of him then the French were hunted out, la bayonette dans le cul; we followed-the battle of Alexandria was won, and our part of the success was, to be marched ten miles off, to look after some of their fragments of baggage. We found nothing, of course; for neither in defeat nor in victory does the Frenchman ever forget himself. In our bivouac, the thought of the lieutenant came over me; in the heat of the march I could not have thought of any thing mortal but my own parched throat and crippled limbs. Absurd as the old subaltern was, I " could have better spared a better man:" we had been thrown together in some strange ways; and as the result of my meditations, I determined to return and see what was become of the man with the red nose. Leave was easily obtained; for there was something of the odd feeling for him that a regiment has for one of those harmless madmen who sometimes follow its drums in a ragged uniform and formidable hat and feather. It was lucky for the lieutenant that I rode hard, for I found him as near a premature exit as ever hero was. A working party had already made his

last bed in the sand: and he was about to take that possession which no ejectment will disturb, when I felt some throbbing about his heart. The soldiers insisted, that as they were ordered out for the purpose of inhuming, they should go through with their work. But if they were sullen, I was resolute; and I prevailed to have the subject deferred to the hospital. After an infinity of doubt, I saw my old friend set on his legs again. But my labour seemed in vain; life was going out; the doctors prohibited the bottle; and the lieutenant felt, like Shylock, that his life was taken away, when that was taken "by which he did live." He resigned himself to die with the composure of an ancient philosopher. The night before I marched for Cairo, I sat an hour with him. He was a changed man, talked more rationally than I had believed within the possibility of brains so many years adust with port; expressed some rough gratitude for my trouble about him, and finally gave me a letter to some of his relatives in England. The regiment was on its march at day-break; we made our way to Cairo, took possession, wondered at its filth, admired its grand mosque, execrated its water, its provisions, and its population; were marched back to storm Alexandria (where I made all possible search for the lieutenant, but in vain); were saved the trouble by the capitulation of the French; were embarked, landed at Portsmouth just one year from our leaving it, and, as it pleased the wisdom of Napoleon, and the folly of our ministry, were disbanded. I had no reason to complain; for though I had been shipwrecked and starved, sick and wounded, I had left neither my life nor my legs behind. Others had been less lucky; and from the losses in the regiment I was now a captain. One day in looking over the relics of my baggage, a letter fell out: it was the red nosed lieutenant's. My conscience reproached me, and I believe for the moment my face was as red as his nose. I delivered the letter; it was received by a matron at the head of three of the prettiest maidens in all

Lancashire, the country of beauty-a blonde, a brunette, and a younger one who was neither, and yet seemed alternately both. I liked the blonde and the brunette infinitely: but the third I did not like, for I fell in love with her, which is a very different thing. The lieutenant was her uncle; and regretted as his habits were, this family circle had much to say for his generosity. Mary's hazel eyes made a fool of me, and I asked her hand, that they might make a fool of no one else. The colonel without the nose was of course invited to the wedding, and he was in such exultation, that either the blonde or the brunette might have been my aunt if she pleased. But they exhibited no tendency to this gay military Torso, and the colonel was forced to content himself with the experience of his submissive nephew. The wedding-day came; and the three sisters looked prettier than ever in their vestal white. The colonel gave the bride away, and in the tears and congratulations of this most melancholy of all happy ceremonies, Mary chose her fate. We returned to dinner, and were seated, all smiles, when the door opened, and in walked-the red-nosed lieutenant! Had I seen, like Brutus, "the immortal Julius' ghost," I could not have been more amazed. But nature was less doubting the matron threw herself into his arms; the blonde and the brunette clasped each a hand; and my bright-eyed wife forgot her conjugal duties, and seemed to forget that I was in the world. There was indeed some reason for doubt: the man before us was fat and florid enough, but the essential distinction of his physiognomy had lost its regal hue. All this, however, was explained by degrees. After my departure for Cairo, he had been given over by the doctors; and sick of taking physic, and determining to die in his own way, he had himself carried up the Nile. The change of air did something for him—the absence of the doctors perhaps more. He domesticated himself among the peasants above the cataracts, drank camel's milk, ate rice, wore a haick, and

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