In the same spirit did he brood over the thousand trifles that the lover treasures up in memory, and on none more than the love-music of Lucy's voice, which he might never hear again.
Never again!--he shrank from those terrible words, and, trusting through God's grace to escape the chances of the war that were before him, he endeavoured to reckon over the days, the weeks, the months, and it might be the years (oh what a prospect for a newly separated lover!) that must pass, before he should again see the little secluded kirk-hamlet, with its blue-slated manse, half buried among the coppice; the Tweed brawling over its pebbled bed in front, under the white-blossomed hawthorns and green bourtree foliage; the ancient church with its stone spire, its old sepulchral yews, and black oak pulpit, where for more than forty years the father of his Lucy had ministered unto a poor but pious flock.
He was an old and white-haired pastor, whose memory went back to those terrible times, when Scotland drew her sword for an oppressed kirk and broken covenant--
"When the ashes of that covenant were scattered far and near, And the voice spoke loud in judgment, which in love she would not hear."
Adam White saw in fancy the dark oak pew, where on Sunday Lucy sat near her father's pulpit, and close to a gothic window, from which the sun, each morning in the year, cast the red glow of a painted cross on her pure and snow-white brow; and so, with his mind full of these things, with a tear in his eye and a prayer of hope on his lip, "rocked on the stormy bosom of the deep," our military pilgrim went to sleep in his cot, as the Lizard light faded away, and word went round from ship to ship that Old England had sunk into the waste of sky and water, far, far astern.
By the many casualties of foreign service, Adam White, on joining the regiment in America, found himself junior captain.
It was now the spring of 1758, and George II. was King. Lieutenant-General Sir Jeffry Amherst, K.C.B., was proceeding on the second expedition against L'Isle Royale, now named Cape Breton, which had belonged to the French since 1713, and was deemed by King Louis the key to Canada and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Meanwhile, Major-General James Abercrombie of Glassa, a gallant Scottish officer, with the 1st Scots Royals, the Black Watch, the 55th, or Westmoreland Regiment, the 62nd, or Royal North Americans, and other troops, to the number of seven thousand regulars and ten thousand provincials, landed from nine hundred batteaux, and one hundred and thirty-five whale-boats, with all their cannon, provisions, and ammunition, on the 6th of July, at the foot of Lake George, a clear and beautiful sheet of water thirty-three miles long, and surrounded by high and verdant mountains. That district, now so busy and populous, was then silent and savage. No sound broke the stillness of the romantic scenery, or the depths of the American forest, but the British drum or Scottish pipe, as the troops formed in four columns of attack, and advanced against the Fort of Ticonderoga.