“Nothing, my worthy host, but your company for half an hour. The evenings grow long, and I hate ‘to drink one hand against the other,’ as we say in Ireland. If I guess right, you have retired from a profession on which I have but entered recently.”
“Yes, sir,” returned he of the Fox and Hounds;--“I wore the king’s livery for fifteen years; and, God bless him, now that I have done my work, he allows me two-and-eightpence a-day to enable me to drink his health in comfort.”
“You seem, when you bade Brown-Bess good-bye, to have taken up comfortable quarters here, my friend.”
“I am, thank God, not only comfortable, but in garrison I hope for life. When I returned home, I married the sergeant-major’s widow. Well, we each had laid by a bit of money--put it together--took this house--and after being five years keeping the business going on, things have gone straight enough with us, and we are better by the half than when we entered it. I wish every worn-out soldier had as snug cantonments for old age.”
“I began in Holland with the Duke of York, and I finished in Spain with poor Sir John.”
“Never but in one, the old steady fifty --th. Under its honoured colours I stood my last field, at Corunna, and fought my first one at Malines.”
“You were in the grenadiers; do you remember who commanded?”
“As stout a soldier as ever took a company into fire--Colonel O’Halloran.”
The retired soldier put down the glass he was lifting to his lips, and for a moment scanned my features eagerly.
“By Heaven!--the living image of the kindest and bravest officer under whom a soldier ever served! I am prouder, sir, in having you this night beneath my humble roof, than if you called a prince your father.” And stretching forward his hand, the veteran grasped mine in his with an honest ardour that proved how deeply military attachment takes root, and how dearly the remembrance of “auld lang syne” is cherished in the soldier’s memory. “And now,” he said, “what is there in the Fox and Hounds which I can offer to my old colonel’s son?”
“Nothing but what is already on the table; but possibly you could, in another matter, render me some assistance?”
“Name but the way in which John Williams can be serviceable.”
“You know my relationship to Mr. Clifford?”