The autumn and winter came. The cold told severely upon my father’s weakened state, and when spring arrived it was evident he had but a short time to live. He wished to see Glencar again. With much difficulty he was brought to the cottage, to die.
In the upper end of the glen there was a wild secluded lake called Lough Cluen. A solitary island stood under the shadow of a tall mountain wall which overhangs the lake on one side. The island is little more than a rock, with yew-trees and ivy growing over it. A ruined church, half hidden in the trees, stood on this rock. It was my father’s grave. He had wished to be buried in this lonely island, and his wish was carried out.
The little cottage, a few acres of land, the rugged mountain and the stream――now formed, with my mother’s scanty pension, all our worldly possessions. Here, then, we took up our residence, and here I grew up, as I have already described――the glen my world; the mountain, lake, and stream my daily playground.
About a mile from our cottage there lived an old pensioner, who, forty years earlier, had followed Wellington from the Tagus to Toulouse. He had served his full term of twenty-one years, and being at the time of his discharge a staff-sergeant, his pension was sufficient to secure him a comfortable home for the rest of his days. He had a few acres of land around his cottage. He was the best angler in the glen. He was my earliest friend and guide with rod and gun on river, lake, and mountain side.
Sergeant MacMahon, formerly of her Majesty’s 40th Regiment, was, when I knew him, a man who had passed his sixtieth year. Yet time, despite a score years of fighting and exposure, had dealt lightly with the old soldier, who still stood as straight as the ramrod he had so often driven home upon the bullet of his firelock. From him I got my first lessons in other things besides fishing and shooting. He taught me the “extension motions,” the “balance step without gaining ground,” the manual and platoon exercises, and the sword exercise. He also showed me the method of attack and defence with the bayonet.
He had the battles of the Peninsula by heart, and day after day did he pour forth his descriptions of how Busaco was won, and how Fuentes d’Onore had been decided, and how Lord Wellington had outmarched “Sowlt,” as he used to call him, at Pampeluna, or had out-manœuvred Marmont at Torres Vedras. His personal adventures were told in another style. He had stories of bivouac――“bivoocing” he used to call it――of nights on outlying picquet, of escapes when patrolling, and of incidents in action, that he loved to recount to me as we sat by the river side waiting for a cloud to cross the sun before we tried a cast of flies over some favourite stream.